#if you choose to live in the land of delusions and I just point out the truth that’s on you 🤷��‍♀️

[seasidewanderers]

How Did I Even Get Here? Or As I Like To Call It, How I Became Syscourse Informed

I've been meaning to make this post for a while. I've been in syscourse for years now, more precisely from I think it was 2019. So for those curious of how even does one get into syscourse... Here's all the lore and backstory.

I'll put it under a cut. Read with extreme caution if you choose to, it's... gonna get ugly in here

Warnings: long ass post; talking about trauma, drug and alcohol abuse, self harm/suicide, psychosis

I had just started university and everything was going to shit. Yeah, I like cold opens alright. You should read my stories. A-hem. I had just started university. I was struggling to make friends - I never had friends before university - I had just shaved all of my hair off. New beginning and all that. My grades in high school weren't stellar but I was managing, while in uni it went all down the drain within the first month.

Living alone meant I could be doing everything I could ever dream of! Getting blackout drunk almost every night. I was buying a bottle of gin and a pack of Monster Ultra White cans to mix in my personal gin and Monster tonic every other day. I was an already psychotic teenager fighting regular psychosis with alcohol induced psychosis, having so many nightmares I was consuming the equivalent of 15-20 espressos a day just to stay awake. The only times I managed to get more than 3 hours of sleep I was near comatose. I wish I was misusing the word.

I was near constantly actively delusional.

(I've talked about it once or twice in here in the context of delusions related to trauma and DID, my most prominent delusion is related to survivor's guilt and early infancy medical trauma. I still get episodes, though now it's more chronic bizarre thoughts and sporadic psychotic depression)

In a year, I left my dormitory room to be with other people in the dormitory exactly once.

I also got to know a guy who turned out to be a drug dealer. I mean, a really nice guy otherwise. He never got me on hard drugs (it was his personal policy to not start someone who has never done hard drugs on hard drugs, and I had mad respect for that lad); he did otherwise just give me stuff if I asked for it. Mainly it was sleeping pills.

I was minding my business with a mix of alcohol, tranquillisers and caffeine up until a point where I took a little too much, fell asleep in class, and couldn't wake up no matter how much my friend was trying to get me awake. I got rushed to the ER and now I'm banned from taking sleeping pills again. Somehow my liver is intact though! Yay

So... what does it have to do with syscourse, you might ask. And you'd be absolutely right to ask.

Nothing and everything. I discovered my system eventually in university. I started noticing that even when I was not drinking, I wouldn't remember shit anyway (which only made me drink more, if I'm not to remember anything, why bother staying sober?)

I then started noticing that I didn't remember anything. About anything. My childhood is a blank. Middle and high school is so fragmented I have no idea what happened, and the few memories I have I'd rather forget.

So what does a 19-20 years old with no friends, almost always drunk, lots of the time high as a kite, forgetful and incredibly depressed, do with their free time?

Tumblr. I started out with looking up people who were talking about ADHD, thinking my forgetfulness was poor attention; then nothing really clicked, so I moved on to mood disorders spaces, thinking it was just depression; then again, yes I do have depression, it's been terrible for many years now, but stable enough, so the sudden heightening of forgetting and not being "really there" didn't really make sense to my depression.

By the end of the school year in June by means that I don't fully remember, I landed in system spaces. First just people talking about being plural, then I discovered the pit full of burning acid that is syscourse.

It actually wasn't so bad for me at first, but I was having a nice time online because I was just following that handful of blogs that I liked, and also I wasn't active in syscourse, just lurking around like a bog creature.

When I started expanding my niche of syscourse blogs, it was... something for sure though. I didn't understand why people were fighting. I didn't understand why everyone is so awful all the time. I get that spaces filled with trauma survivors are bound to get emotionally charged, and as the old adage goes, hurt people hurt people. I get that rationally, I get the anger, sadness, and grief, but I wouldn't imagine taking my frustration out on a passerby who's not the cause of my trauma. I don't get being mean on purpose.

At some point a few years ago I stumbled upon @sysmedsaresexist and @thecircularsystem (or rather, circulars-reasoning and circular-bircular)

If I remember correctly, they were both anti endo when I got to their blogs, and I was very pro endo. I didn't, and still don't, have any reason not to be.

I started reading everything they were putting out. Every little link and file they shared got under a microscope by my part.

Part of it was just paranoia - I know they're saying something terrible. There has to be something in there that says endos are all murderers or something and I'll be in so, so much trouble for being pro endo.

Part of it was just curiosity - what do they have to say? Let me take a look at that.

And then... There was absolutely nothing that made me believe they hated me specifically (more broadly, nothing in their resources that disproved the existence of endogenic plurality, but at the time that to me was equal to "if you're pro endo I hate your face and I'll be stabbing you in a dark alley first chance I get")

And... I loosened up a bit. I still didn't properly talk to them until this year, after SAS' Changing Mindsets post, and I can say I regret not reaching out sooner. I kept reading everything they were putting out, laughing at memes, and asked lots of questions. I tried going at it with more and more curiosity and less and less fear of stepping out of an imagined line.

It didn't always go well. I am very paranoid and it takes very little for me to retract into my shell like a turtle. But! I made a lot of progress with that, too. I also learned that a) I don't have to immediately respond to asks, comments, etc out of impulse or anger, I can actually take my time! and b) I don't have to reply at all if I don't want to!!! How great is that!!!!!

I don't know why people keep saying that you can't be friends with pro/antis. That's what I needed to do! I needed to get the fuck out of my own head, get to know other people, talk to them, see where they're coming from.

Though I wouldn't say I'm friends with them exactly, simply because friend to me has a specific connotation, but they are nice people who I love talking to. Who'd have thought the Scary Anti Endo could be *reads notes* a person with their own interests and hobbies?? Oh SHIT this is NEW.

Enough talking about my background, over to the thanks, like it's my wedding day and y'all are my best men.

Circ, Dude (and all other SAS mods, though I know half of you half as much as I would like), thank you. You've done a lot for me even if you didn't know who the fuck I was until two or three months ago. You threw some PDFs and links over to my general direction and, man, I needed that.

I've been very bad. And then I've been slightly better, and then very bad again, and I'm better again. This time I don't plan on going very bad again though. I hope I can get better every day.

[ancestorsofjudah]

2 Kings 1: 1-8. "The Upper Room."

The First Book of Kings concludes after 22 Chapters. The Gematria calls this sha'uar, a "port", but also "something horrible, swept away by the storm." The story ends with a bad man, Ahab, and his relative, Ahaziah, one long-lived, the other not, being swept away by corruption and delusion.

The text provides us with a few good eggs, the best egg being Jehoshaphat, "Who Governs in God's Name." A brave adventurer and meditator, Jehoshaphat was also blown out to sea but instead of notoriety, he found the far shore of Judaism, shipwrecked himself there, and did not return.

This is what it means to be a Jewish Royal; to know without a doubt though one appears to be physically bound here, the truth is stranded on the distant shore of Ha Shem.

Ha Shem, the storm of old who sweeps away the wicked and the righteous alike is verily the wind the sea, and the dry land on the other side.

Here begins The Second Book of the Melachim.

The Lord’s Judgment on Ahaziah

1 After Ahab’s death, Moab rebelled against Israel. 

2 Now Ahaziah had fallen through the lattice of his upper room in Samaria and injured himself. So he sent messengers, saying to them, “Go and consult Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron, to see if I will recover from this injury.”

3 But the angel of the Lord said to Elijah the Tishbite, “Go up and meet the messengers of the king of Samaria and ask them, ‘Is it because there is no God in Israel that you are going off to consult Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron?’ 

4 Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘You will not leave the bed you are lying on. You will certainly die!’” So Elijah went.

The Upper Room is the space in which one attains to Ezion Geber, the distant shore along the Black Sea along which the God of Israel performs His Daily Promenade.

Ahaziah, "who grasps" was not able to let go of his habits for extroversion and he fell through the lattice work, the scriptures which explain how and why this is done.

As we have learned a real Jew understands how to view the world external to Ha Shem, "complete understanding of existence" and His own internal logic. The lattice work supports the sojourn but it cannot in any way be trusted to convey us to the end on its own.

MOAB "the father's ways" are the biggest cause of failure of the lattice work. The Torah and the Tanakh, its supporting documents, explain, the way a river bed explains to a river, how mankind follows a natural state of evolution from birth onward.

As in Eden, parents are supposed to say no much more than they say yes to a child until he reaches the Age of Reason.

During this time, we are supposed to force teenagers to resort to the Instructions contained in the Torah in order to cement the ethics behind certain rules and expectations that are placed on small kids. The result is the creation of an entity that can think, feel, reason, and perform like an adult who does not indulge in sin.

MOAB suggests the Torah and Gospels were given to Moses and Saint Mark for different reasons; reasons we concocted to suit our own purposes instead of the achievement of adulthood after the onset of fertility.

Just look at this world as a result of its decision to choose "tradition", instead of Torah. The Torah says "do not murder, do not steal, do not covet, do not lie, do not profane, do not idolize others..." and has tasked the King of Israel and the Line of Succession to ensure the lines between these and tradition do not become blurred. But blurry they are. The persons in control of this planet observe them not at all and we have found other ways, Moab, to be religious that are not working.

When this happens, especially the King of Israel, why would anyone believe in the God of Israel? Or especially when so many imperfect, devious and disgusting men who claim to believe in Him are destroying everything in their point of view?

Let us review the opening verses of 2 Kings and see how this happens to us:

v. 1: 1089, יח‎ט‎, "a private." To insulate ourselves from tradition, we need to achieve excellence with the scriptures on our own. The ship to the far shore is a one seater.

v. 2: Baal-Zebub of Ekron, "The god on the ground who resides in a high house and brings ruin." Ahaziah clearly thinks boys, bumps, and boogie are going to make him feel better about his unbelief.

The Number is 10101, yamka, "that which lives between the sea and the day."

The Seventh Day of Pesach commemorates the Splitting of the Red Sea, the climax of the Exodus from Egypt. Until “Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore,”1 they re­mained in dread of Egypt’s military might; some were even prepared to submit to slavery again rather than risk death.2 After the Splitting of the Sea, however, all fear of danger ended and they experienced true freedom.

Our Sages consider these two events, the Exodus from Egypt and the Splitting of the Red Sea, to be of such funda­mental importance that they require us to recall them every day.3 This obligation indicates that they are not simply inci­dents in history. Instead, the Exodus from Egypt and the Splitting of the Red Sea reflect two continually relevant stages in our service of G‑d.

Leaving Egypt means transcending our limitations and ceasing to be slaves by identifying ourselves as servants of G‑d.4 The Exodus from Egypt was not complete, however, until the Splitting of the Red Sea. By the same token, on a personal level, each individual’s experience of leaving Egypt is incomplete without the spiritual parallel to the Splitting of the Red Sea.

The commitment to leave Egypt, to transcend the limits of our individual selves, often poses a problem, for even those who are firmly committed to Torah practice experience the material world as their frame of reference. Mitzrayim, symbol of the limitations of our worldly existence, determines their world-view.

It is our false belief the world cannot be changed that keeps us trapped on this side of the Sea, and we are trying to reach the far side. The Torah requires us to commit to overcoming the habits that have made this world come apart and move forward as it has dictated.

We cannot turn to false aerial gods like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, both who have turned themselves into gods and expect this to happen.

v. 3: God tells Elijah "the returning homesteader" to reinstate His Presence. The Value is 6985, בט‎חה, "trustfulness."

Who do you trust? A pedophile crackwhore and his followers, a madman who hates everyone and everything, or God Himself?

v. 4: 10553, יההג‎, yehg, "to see through the illusions."

ye=

here are two different roots עין ('ayin), or so it seems. HAW Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament and BDB Theological Dictionary both state that the connection between עין ('ayin) meaning eye and עין ('ayin) meaning spring or fountain is uncertain, and perhaps that is true from an etymological perspective. In practice it's no real miracle that these two words (may have) evolved into the same form since both an eye and a fountain produce water.

The noun עין ('ayin), meaning eye, produces the verb עין ('in), meaning to eye (1 Samuel 18:9).

The identical noun עין ('ayin), now meaning spring or fountain, produces the noun מעין (ma'yan), also meaning spring. HAW Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament submits that by the word עין ('ayin) more than just the eye itself is implied. "Occasionally it represents the whole process of seeing [ . . . ] of understanding and obedience. [ . . . ] The eye is used to express knowledge, character, attitude, inclination, opinion, passion and response".

hg= Hermes. The verb ερμηνευω (hermeneuo) means to interpret, explain or translate, and emphasizes the crossing of borders (i.e. between language areas or schools of thought). It's obviously related to hermeneutics, or the branch of knowledge that deals with theories of interpretation.

Elijah, the Presence of God attempts to fill the vacuum created by idolatry, the idea that a man supplant the realities asserted by God and nature and make them after his own image instead of the other way around. This process turns God into a graven image, a vile thing that causes dread when in reality He is Ha Shem and cannot be modified by the nonsense of man.

To attempt to locate Ha Shem using the direction finders in the scripture is what is meant by the use of messengers:

5 When the messengers returned to the king, he asked them, “Why have you come back?”

6 “A man came to meet us,” they replied. “And he said to us, ‘Go back to the king who sent you and tell him, “This is what the Lord says: Is it because there is no God in Israel that you are sending messengers to consult Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron? Therefore you will not leave the bed you are lying on. You will certainly die!”’”

7 The king asked them, “What kind of man was it who came to meet you and told you this?”

8 They replied, “He had a garment of hair[a] and had a leather belt around his waist.”

The king said, “That was Elijah the Tishbite.”

To end the practices of idolatry, one must acknowledge Elijah, the Homesteader. He is found within flesh and blood and conquered animal man, the leather garter found around his waist.

Our failure to recognize the Presence of God by practicing wickedness is why the world is sprinting into darkness. This is what is meant by "you will not leave the bed you are lying on."

The man that gets up, the truly religious one will be the one that lives on. His Number is 5690, ה‎וטאֶפֶס‎, tapes "the man whose words sit between the heaven and the earth."*

*From Ta, ata, also et, comes from Bereshit, "the writing explains right to left the heavens and the earth" aka "the latticework."

[cosmicjoke]

Hey, don't apologize! This is a great addition! And 100% spot on. The ending really just leaves no room for doubt as to Eren's true motivations, but yes, he absolutely admitted, well before that moment, to the actual reason behind why he did what he did. It was 100% selfish and self-motivated. People who are still denying this are living in a land of delusion. This is just who Eren is. I also love that you bring up that Eren regretted it, in the end. Because I see people who try to blame Levi for telling Eren to choose what he would "least regret", trying to say it was Levi's fault that Eren made the choices that he did, which is absolutely insane and so off the mark, it's not even funny. Eren literally did the OPPOSITE of what Levi told him. He made the choice that he KNEW was wrong, in his heart. That he understood was the worst possible choice he could make, the choice he KNEW he would regret, and he still did it. He couldn't hide from the truth. Not in the end, and not even before the end. Eren always knew what he was doing was wrong, he always understood what it was, and why he was doing it. And the ending wasn't so much pre-determined, as it only existed in the first place because it's what Eren WANTED to happen. If he didn't want it, the future he saw never would have been. It was a future of his own making.

And yes, about Mikasa too. Great point about the scarf, and what it represents, and how Eren never understood why it meant so much to Mikasa. Him wrapping that scarf around her was symbolic of, as you said, humanity, of the concepts of love and family. It wasn't a chain around her neck, it was hope.

Anyway, yeah, people just really don't understand Eren's character. They don't get it. As he admits over and over, he was simply just "born this way". Never satisfied, never able to appreciate what he had, never able to accept the world around him, both the good and the bad. Nobody made him or influenced him to do what he did. He did that on his own. That's who he always was. The only thing the world did, through its prejudice and stupidity, was allow a person like Eren to come into the power needed to carry out his mad desires. But the world itself, and the people around him, didn't put those desires into his head, despite what Armin tries to say. That's just Eren's nature.

You know what's really screwed up about Eren's confession to Armin in the end? He admits to Armin that he knew only 20% of the human population would be saved, that 80% would perish, and even knowing that, he still went ahead and enacted the Rumbling. He knew the conflict wouldn't be solved, or ended, by enacting the Rumbling, because he knew the future, and knew that he wouldn't succeed in wiping out the entirety of humanity beyond the walls. He knew by enacting the Rumbling, he would only worsen the conflict and ensure its continued existence. He knew, in the end, that he was in fact dooming Paradis, not saving it. And he did it anyway. He did what he wanted anyway. That's why Armin gets so upset and angry at him, why he asks him so emphatically "why?", because he realizes what Eren is saying, what he's confessing to being. If anyone ever had any doubt, or actually thought Eren did it to save Paradis or the Eldian's or his friends, his confession to Armin at the end unequivocally proves otherwise. Eren did it because he wanted to. Because he wanted to see the sight of an empty, desolate world. That's what ultimately broke Eren, having to be faced with the truth of his own monstrosity. He couldn't hide from it, even as he initially lies to Armin and tries to tell him he did it to save his friends. Eren was a monster. Tragic for how he genuinely cared about his friends, genuinely loved them, but he couldn't put them over his own, selfish desires, and couldn't overcome his own, horrendous nature. Eren is a cautionary tale too, for what happens when we persecute others, and blame others and collectively punish others for things they didn't do. Eventually, it leads to someone gaining power who shouldn't have it. An idiot like Eren, a child like Eren. He never matured as a human being. He never grew. He retained the selfishness of a child to the very end. And we see then what a person like Eren does with that power. Truly terrifying.

[girlactionfigure]

There's something I need to get off my chest.

I'm an Ultra-Orthodox, Chassidic, Hareidi Jew. I live in Jerusalem, in an area that is exclusively Ultra-Orthodox Hareidi for street after street, suburb after suburb, for miles and miles. In all of these neighborhoods where the roads are blocked off and no cars drive on Shabbos, each black-hat-wearing family has many many children and literally no TV’s. I personally only ever wear black and white clothes, my wife only dresses in Chassidic levels of tznius (modesty), and my boys and girls all attend mainstream Hareidi Chassidic schools where the main language is Yiddish. My kids don’t and never will have smartphones, nor have they ever been on the internet at all. Period. They don’t know what social media is and they’ve never seen a movie — not even Disney animation. 

Having lived exclusively immersed in this culture for the last 21 years, I think I'm sufficiently qualified and well-researched enough to state that the consistent depiction of Hareidim and Torah Judaism by mainstream media, from Netflix to the daily news, is somewhere between delusion, slander and the literal equivalent of racism. If you consider yourself less closed-minded than how you imagine we Hareidim to be, then permit me to share a few personal details about my family, and other families in our neighborhood, to see how well your mental narrative matches up to reality:

- Besides learning Torah each day, most of the men in our neighborhood work full or part-time.

- Many women in our area work. Some even manage their own business or company. These are not special or “liberated” women — it’s so normal here it’s not even a discussion point.

- My wife is a full-time mother by choice, who despite attending an Ivy League College,  finds it a profound and meaningful thing to dedicate her life to. If she didn’t, she’d go get a job. Mind you, she also attends Torah classes each week, works out with both a female fitness coach (who’s gay) and a frum Pilates instructor, writes and edits articles for a couple global websites and magazines, and personally mentors a number of women. None of this is seen as unusual. 

- Kids in our community go to Torah schools where they learn (surprise!) Torah. They are fluent in three languages from a young age and the boys even read and understand a fourth (Aramaic). All the kids learn grammar, math and science. Weekly after-school activities have included music (violin, drums, piano), Tae Kwon Do, swimming, art, woodworking and robotics. The girls' school teaches tools of emotional intelligence. The principal of the boys' school doesn't hesitate to refer to kids to OT if needed. I practice meditation with my children multiple times each week. None of our kids think the world is literally 6,000 years old. They devour books about science and think it’s cool. They know dinosaurs existed and don’t find that existentially threatening. They have a telescope with which they love to watch the stars. 

- The women in my family (like the men) only dress modestly according to Hareidi standards. The girls don't find this burdensome or oppressive. Period. They aren't taught that beauty is bad. They're certainly not taught to hate their bodies, God forbid. Each morning when they get dressed, they are as happily into their own fashion and looking pretty as any secular girl is. They just have a different sense of fashion than secular culture dictates. (Unfortunately for me,  it's no cheaper.)

- The local Hareidi rabbis we receive guidance from are deep, warm, sensitive, supportive and emotionally intelligent. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t go to them.

- My boys assume they will grow up to learn Torah, as much as they want to, and then when they’re ready, get a good job or learn a profession to support whatever lifestyle they choose. My girls assume they’ll be wives and mothers (which they can’t wait for) but they're also warmly encouraged to train in whatever other profession they desire. (My 9-year-old daughter, chatting with her friend in the living room, just commented, "I want to be a mother and a teacher and an artist." Her friend replied, "I'm going to be a ballet teacher.") All options are on the table, and their future seems bright.

- We love living in modern Israel, feel proud and blessed to be here, and frequently count and celebrate its blessings. Everyone in my area votes. Sometimes not even for Hareidi parties. I pay taxes. (And they’re expensive!)

- As a Hareidi person, I’m glad we have Hareidi representation in the government — though I don’t always love or approve of how the Hareidi politicians act, or what they choose to represent. For the record, I'm equally dubious about secular politicians, as well. 

- While I don't spend much time in Tel Aviv, I do have a few close Hareidi entrepreneur friends who have founded high-tech start-ups there, and are — Boruch Hashem! — doing very well.   

- We don’t hate all non-religious people. Our kids don’t throw stones at passing cars on Shabbos. I doubt they even know anyone who would do that or think that it’s ok. We frequently talk about the Torah value of caring for and being compassionate towards everyone. As a family, we proactively try to find ways to judge others favorably (even those people who throw stones at passing cars on Shabbos.)

- We invite all manner of religious and secular Jews to join our Shabbos meals each week and the kids are open, happy, and confident to welcome everyone. (No, we're not Chabad.) One of the many reasons for having such guests at our table is to teach the kids this lesson.

- While we would technically be classified as right-wing and we don’t at all buy the modern “Palestinian” narrative, we certainly don’t hate all Arabs, nor do we have any desire to expel them all from the land. We warmly welcome anyone seeking to dwell here with us in peace and we are pained and saddened to see the suffering and loss of lives of all innocent Arab families and children — as would any decent human being.

- Of the few local families I know whose kids no longer identify as religious, none at all chose to disown their kids. The very thought, in such lovingly family-dedicated communities, is hard to imagine. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm just saying it's not as common as it's made out. Rather, these families have tirelessly, profoundly, compassionately committed to maintaining any connection with their children, and to emphasize that, no matter what, family is the most important thing. Because it is.

- We aren't just living our life blindly, dogmatically following empty religious rules; rather, we are frequently engaged with, exploring and discussing Torah's richness, depth and meaning. Our kids honestly love learning Torah, praying and doing mitzvos. They’re visibly excited about Shabbos and festivals. This lifestyle is in no way oppressive or burdensome for them. If you suggested to them it was, they’d laugh and think you were crazy.  

- We Hareidim are normal people: we laugh, we cry, we buy too much Ikea furniture, and we struggle with all of life's daily ups and downs, just like the rest of you. Some of our communities are more healthy and balanced, some are less so; some of our people are warmer, nicer and more open, some are more closed, dogmatic and judgmental; some of our leaders are noble and upstanding, and some are quite frankly idiots…JUST LIKE ANY SECULAR NEIGHBORHOOD IN THE WORLD TOO. But having grown up living a secular lifestyle myself, and today being Hareidi-by-choice, I can testify that in these communities there is generally a greater and more tangible sense of well-being, warmth, tranquility, connection and meaning. We love and feel blessed to be living this life and wouldn’t want any other.

If this description of Hareidi life is hard to swallow, be careful not to push back with the often-used defenses like: "Well, you're just an exception to the rule...", "You're just American Hareidim", "You're baalei teshuvah", "Well, I know a bunch of Haredim that aren't like that at all"....because the truth is, while there might be many Hareidim who aren't like what I described above, it's still an accurate description of literally hundreds of thousands of Hareidim in Israel and the US — a decent portion of all Hareidim in the world. Which is my very point — how come you never see this significant Hareidi demographic represented in the media, television series, or the news? How come we mostly see the darkest and most problematic cliches instead? 

And finally, if all the facts I've listed above about our communities are hard for you to accept as true, then perhaps the image you have in your head about Hareidim is less based on facts and reality and more based on stereotypes, fear, hate, and discrimination — like any other form of prejudice in the world. 

Care to prove me wrong? Well, you're welcome to come argue it out with me and my family at our Shabbos table on Friday night. It would be a joy and honor to have you. 

Doniel Katz

[youryanderedaddy]

Lady Luck (pt. 1)

I was so hyped to write this lol. Heavily inspired by Kaiji <3

Tw: mafia mention, unrealistic potrayal of mafia, mentions of threats, implied obssessive behavior (will get more hardcore in the second part tho), mentions of gambling, kidnapping /not reader/

 You knew that you were a scum, a lowlife, a miserable loser without much hope in life - that’s exactly why you had no problem joining the deadliest underground paradise and following under the steps of the Lucciano family. They controlled everything - the casinos, the drugs, the guns, the whores, you name it - they provided it. And you had nothing - neither a past, nor a future. But everything changed when the oldest son Thomas decided to help you get out of the mud and step onto your legs - he gave you a home, a friend to return to, a shoulder to cry on when reality felt too painful and harsh, just too much to bear on your own. “Why would you do that for a stranger?” You had asked him once while tipsy, sitting by the hearth, a slight blush adorning your soft cheeks. “That’s easy.” The man had responded right away without giving it much thought. “You remind me of myself.”

 You spent long nights thinking about his words but never came to a conclusion - he was born into a powerful, wealty family, so it made no sense for him to have experienced rock bottom the way you had. And his small black eyes displayed such a variety of terryfing emotions - bloodlust, greed, sin and so much sadness. Why would a monster ever feel scared, you wondered. 

 Working for the Luccianos wasn’t especially hard or even dangerous - you ran small errands for them, took care of the younger kids, helped with insignificant deals, acted as a croupier when their staff was sick or missing or had to be taken care of, but one thing you were thankful for was how they never tried to force you into doing something you would never be able to forgive yourself for. Thomas was kind to you -  always so considerate, willing to listen, to understand how you felt even when the worlds you two lived in differed so greatly. He was supposed to be villain of the story, big and scary, demanding, taking whatever he wants without asking and never feeling an ounce of regret about it. And for a while, you were suspicous of the man’s every move - you were desperately waiting for the mobster to fuck up and show his true colours so you could let yourself hate him, despise him. And yet the sweet, sweet moment of revelation never came. You knew, of course, of the many evil deeds the criminal bestowed upon thousands of innocent people each and every day, but you never witnessed it with your own eyes and when the man was treating you like a part of his family, holding you close and giving you chance after chance to prove yourself, it was slowly getting impossible to view him as the bad guy. Perhaps you should have waited just a little longer.

 It happened during a warm, spring day. You didn’t expect it, you couldn’t. You had just finished your shift at midnight in the small shop you worked in, which belonged to Thomas’ mother, and were heading to the Lucciano mansion. It had been a particularly long and exhausting day, so you wanted nothing more than to feel the soft, silky, white sheets down your half-naked body while the quiet classical music took you to dream land and back. But upon opening the heavy wooden door, you quickly noticed something was different - there was no music, the big black TV in the middle of the hall was set to camera mode instead of the normal one, and it was awfully quiet. “They must have had to leave the country for a while.” You rationalised. “It has happened before after all.” You kept reassuring yourself while taking a tiny step towards the centre of the room where light was the strongest - it could uncover every hidden little detail.

 And then the TV was turned on. You shifted your gaze up, paranoia eating at you from inside out. Soon there was clear image on the massive screen, but what you saw left you speechless. There were hours of footage from your personal life - working, hanging out with friends, eating, bathing. What made the shivers down your spine run cold was a scene where a guy, your boyfriend, was kissing you, touching you, undressing you with his praying eyes. It was nothing unusual for a young woman to have a love life, but this broke the only rule Thomas had told you upon entering the house - you were forbidden from having close relationships with men, especially dangerous ones, and for the longest time, you had no issue living by that as long as you came back to the luxury and warmth the mobster provided for you. Until you met him - a charming, clever member of a local gang. You knew it was wrong and could cost you more than you were willing to sacrifice and yet you still gave in. It was your first time experiencing the highs and lows of love, so who could blame you when it was such a magical feeling, a mixture of adrenaline and opium. Alex made you feel like a real human being instead of someone just existing, leeching off the stronger, wealthier species.

 There was a shadow moving out from the corner, playing into your delusions. But soon enough you realised it was all a reality as none other than Thomas walked slowly towards you, clapping his hands dramatically, a sly smirk on his beautiful, scarred face. Did he...

 "Congratulations." The man started off, dark eyes set on you, slowly coming closer and closer like a big black hole, ready to swallow you whole. "You went and got yourself a little boy - toy." The criminal chuckled viciously under his breath, making you cringe at the crude nickname he used. The situation felt surreal and yet the fear and panic were already suffocating you, making you dizzy wish regret. "I wish you would have told me though... I never thought someone I hold so important would lie to me." The mobster kept rambling, waving his arms in the air theatrically, while holding a lit cigarette, but never moving it to his lips - it was just a prop, a way to create a thick smoke mist in your eyes. It was finally the hour of judgement.

 "What do you want?" You asked, faking confidence, desperate to take control of what was happening. It was a bizarre thing to see your dearest friend act in such a eerie, frightening way, almost treating you like one of his victims - nothing more than an indebted bastard or an unfortunate bystander, unlucky enough to catch a deal unfolding right behind the scenes. It hurt but you had forced this upon yourself and you had to fix it.

 "Nothing much, really." Thomas replied, finally inhaling the deadly smoke into his open mouth. He played with his collar for a while, as if you weren't standing there, scared for your life. "I just want to teach you a lesson in obedience, doll." The mafioso continued, circling you slowly, his heavy gaze never leaving your body. You felt awfully exposed even when all your clothes were present, covering every inch of your skin. With a swift snap of his fingers, the man summoned most of the gorillas that worked under him. Two of them were dragging your kicking, screaming boyfriend towards the centre of the room, but a quick punch in the guts managed to quiet him down. He looked terrified, his face bloody and injured, covered in dust and misery. But he was still alive and only that mattered to you.

 "I wanted to make this entertaining for all of us." The oldest Lucciano spoke out, his husky voice echoing trough the golden ceiling. He moved over to your lover and harshly pressed the cigarette butt against the exposed skin of his unprotected arm. The man cried out in pain, silently pleading you to help with his big, terrified eyes. And here you were, as helpess as he was - if not even more. "So I decided to initiate a little gamble of sorts, ya know?" Thomas winked at you, smiling with malice. You couldn't help, but recall all the times you two had played poker together, betting less than pocket change. You never understood why the man always got so excited despite winning such small sums, especially when his casinos already did well. But now you could see it clearly - he got off crushing his opponent, taking the victory under their noses. Money meant nothing. As long as he was able to ruin your mood, your life, the man was pleased.

 Soft white light lit up the furthest corners of the hall and you saw dozen square boxes, arranged in a circle. It looked harmless enough on its own, still they were stamped with Thomas’ symbol - a dove. You used to wonder why someone in the most dangerous depts of mafia would choose such an innocent, sweet signature pf representation and now the answer was right in front of you - that way it was easier to trick the enemy into thinking they were safe. And how wrong were they. 

 “As you can see, there are nine wooden boxes in total. They look exactly the same and on top of each one there is a hole.” Thomas stopped to point at them, the raw anticipation flooding his otherwise dull pupils. “Six of the boxes are empty. In the other three though, there are placed some of the most poisonous snakes in the world. One bite and you are dead.” The madman gave a loud, breathy laugh while your boyfriend squirmed uncomfortably in place, restrained by the strong arms, holding him down. “Both of you will take four turns putting your hand in the boxes. After every round the box would be closed off and you would be able to choose only from the remaining ones. ” The mobster grinned widely, looking at your horrified expression. You couldn’t believe that the man was willing to put your lives on the line simply because you had neglected one of his orders. “Now you may be wondering where the suspence is - after all you would probaby manage to hear the hissing from afar and avoid the place it comes from. Rest assured, my foolish little friends. Right now the snakes are heavily intoxicated and absolutely silent - which doesn’t mean, of course, that they won’t attack any soft flesh they see. If you die, that’s on you, but if you survive, you will be rewarded.” Thomas clapped his hands together and his man let go of your lover, resulting in his falling to the ground with a heavy bang. Thomas pursed his lips together.

 “Shall we get started?”

[themauvesoul]

Anyways if I was gonna do an epic s8 rewrite:

y’all remember that Sam and John parallel they set up all the way back in s1 and didn’t do anything with bc the writers collectively forgot abt it? Payoff time babey. Put a pin in that.

Anyways. The first ep opens exactly where s7 ended. Dean and cas just vanished. Dick is exploded. Kevin is freaking out. Crowley is gloating.

Like I think sam should snap. He’s just been through the wringer. He’s been beat down and beat down for a solid year at this point. He’s lost and grief stricken and doesn’t know what to do, but he gets Kevin out and away from crowley. And then Kevin looks at him and says there was something else on that tablet. It said there was a way to seal hell off forever.

ok so. lemme explain some things.  I think that sam is at his core a very angry person, just like dean at his core is always afraid.  So like.  Dean will lash out and use anger to cover his fear.  Sam tries to sublimate and suppress his anger by choosing to be kind instead.  and i think that s7 made him feel too tired and helpless to be angry, UNTIL kevin accidentally gave him an outlet.  so like.  I wanna see sams repression skills fail.  I wanna see him lose the last shit he had left to give and go absolutely balls to the walls insane.  I want a mystery spot 2.0: This Time It’s Permanant.  

And HERES the payoff of that little parallel. Sam latches onto revenge the way that John latched onto his. like theyre operating under the same delusion: if i kill the thing that destroyed my life, I’ll experience some sort of catharsis.

So like. Sam goes off the deep end. I think he starts off by going full witch, but I think it would be extremely sexy if he eventually started drinking demon blood again. Kevin is like. i dont think this is right but idk enough about hunting or witchcraft to dispute it.  They’re on an evil road trip trying to track down the demon tablet and kill crowley once and for all. This is the A plot.

The second ep opens with dean landing in purgatory. This is the B plot.

The season alternates between Sam doing evil fucked up shit on his and Kevin’s revenge road trip and dean doing fucked up shit in purgatory

Sam and Kevin get ahold of the demon tablet for a bit, and decode enough of it to start doing the trials. that happens in s8 right? im only halfway thru.

Idk if spn has a mid season break, but halfway thru the season shit pops tf off. Sam completes the first trial, and in the same ep dean finally gets out of purgatory. that would happen in the last ep before the midseason break. idk yall i havent watched a tv show live in literal years.

Speaking of purgatory, I think it’s dumb that the angels scooped cas out of purgatory. So I’m changing it. Instead, cas goes out of the portal with dean, but the angels scoop him mid-transit. Dean wakes up alone in the woods and cas wakes up in heaven, speaking with Naomi.

I think there should be a power struggle in heaven, between Naomi and metatron. They’re fighting to control lesser angels like pawns. Naomi has an edge because she can like. Brainwash angels into being loyal to her, but metatron LOVES murder and manipulation.  Girlboss of him.

Shit REALLY pops tf off in the second half of the season. Sam is doing the trials. Kevin is helping Sam do the trials. Dean is desperately trying to get Sam to stop, because the trials are actively killing him. Dean is also having a really hard time adjusting to normal life after being in purgatory. Cas is actively being brainwashed by Naomi. Crowley found the angel tablet, and now he’s trying to close heaven, while simultaneously trying to fend off winchester and co

Crypt scene! It’s exactly the same. Naomi tries to make cas kill dean, but he breaks free and fucks off with the angel tablet. its extremely homoerotic.  Dean DOES say i forgive you, cas.  I love you.

Metatron finds cas after he fucks off and convinces cas that the only way to save earth from getting caught in the crossfire of a three-way war is to close off heaven, while the winchesters close off hell.

The end is the same as canon. Metatron tricks cas into giving up his grace, and then uses it to make all the angels fall. The last shot of the season is that one with all the angels falling from the sky.

In conclusion why so many flashbacks when you could just start the season at a different point in time mr. carver. explain your thought process to me.

[shimmershae]

The more I think about it, the more “Find Me” feels like an echo of “Ghosts.”

Allow me to explain.  In probably the most rambling and incoherent way possible, lol.  My earlier post on Twitter about Season 10 being an exercise in grief and longing really got me to thinking.  Not just thinking.  Ruminating.  

Anywho.  

Posting the rest of this beneath a cut because nobody asked for this (I swear I haven’t imbibed or ingested any illegal substances).  

It doesn’t take long for Carol to be established as an unreliable narrator in “Ghosts.”  At first it isn’t completely obvious because there’s just enough fact in the fiction that Carol’s triggered brain stirs up.  Daryl’s there and he’s concerned about her.  He’s supportive.  Both things he’d been before, especially since Henry’s death, but there are just enough elements in those chemically and grief induced hallucinations of hers that make you go--oh wait a minute.  Like she’s having a break from reality but she’s desperately grasping for that which grounds her and that’s Daryl.  

Am I making any sense here?  I feel like I’m not.  

Let me approach this from another angle.  

Following the airing of “Find Me” various people mentioned that Daryl, similarly to Carol in “Ghosts” wasn’t exactly the most reliable narrator.  That things weren’t necessarily as they seemed.  The word toxic was bandied about but other than Leah giving Daryl an ultimatum to choose her over his family and Daryl dwelling in deep, longstanding depression?  There wasn’t much else overtly deserving of that moniker. 

Argh.  I’m still not explaining myself well.  Let me just jump right in the deep end of probable delusion here.  Sometimes it’s fun to splash around, lol.   

Wouldn’t it be wild—sad AF but still wild—if Leah was already dead when Daryl met her?  

Bear with me here.   

Like Carol in “Ghosts” Daryl is obviously struggling.  He’s grief-stricken.  His brother is lost to him and after he betrayed him no less.  His close friend is mired in her own grief--she’s just lost her mate, probably recently discovered she was carrying RJ, and it wasn’t too long before that they had all lost Carl.  And that’s not even considering Carol, who’s allowed herself to be pulled away, lured by the tantalizing chance of doing things right this time.  Of rearing a child capable of surviving in the harsh world they live in.  Another thing to remember is Daryl is not that far removed from his torture at Negan’s hands.  So he’s more fragile than he’d willingly admit to anyone.  

He’s searching the woods for a man that isn’t there.  Now he’s no more aware that Rick was taken than the rest of Team Family, but he’s unwilling to give up hope and so he searches and because Rick’s not there and hasn’t been since shortly after that bridge blew up, Daryl’s doomed to always come up empty.  To always feel disappointment.  To never have his grief assuaged because as long as there’s no body in the form of a Walker, there’s still hope.  Or plausible denial.  Take your pick.  

He’s tireless in his search.  He’s methodical.  He plots out the places he’s already scoured on a hand-drawn map.  A map that just so happens to get ruined by an awful storm and Daryl seems to reach his breaking point, screaming out into the roar of that storm.  Walking through the barrage, the harsh rain and the violent lightning, unconcerned for his safety.  

Dude has a bit of a mental break.  He’s undeniably emotional.  

It’s not long after that he stumbles upon Dog.  Or, more aptly, Dog stumbles upon him.  

That puppy immediately lightens Daryl’s heavy heart and helping it find its way home gives him purpose.  He’s a tracker after all.  He could have easily traced Dog’s steps back to that cabin.  

Funny that Dog was always coming to him.  That he was roaming free in woods that were full of hidden dangers.  

I don’t know about the rest of ya’ll but that cabin looked abandoned when Daryl first discovered it.  Maybe not long abandoned, but it didn’t look inhabited by the living. And that’s the weird thing.  How did that Walker get into the cabin?  Did Leah just leave the door wide open for it?  Did she also leave the door wide open for Dog to escape?  Why was he always such an unaccompanied furry minor? 

The thoughts swirling around in my brain, lovelies.  They’re going to force me to go back and watch that fucking episode again aren’t they?

My point is that Dog essentially leads Daryl to the cabin. The Walker’s inside and then he stumbles upon Leah, who bursts onto the scene like she wants to be Sarah Connor or something. Daryl ends up in restraints and Leah questions him and ultimately lets him go and WTF, lovelies.  Who does that in the ZA?  As a woman all alone in a cabin miles from anybody else, in the company of a man she doesn’t know from Adam?  If ever there’s a time to have stranger danger...

Right from the start, this chick doesn’t really add up.

So Daryl leaves the cabin.  He resumes his search for Rick and he seems to give very little thought to this Leah or the cabin.  Until Dog finds him again.  

Strange isn’t it that he keeps stumbling back in her path around the times that Carol visits, when she draws further and further from his reach and closer to the fairytale he thinks she’s living at the Kingdom?  

Did Daryl ever go to that cabin without following Dog? I can’t remember.  The episode was beautifully shot but ultimately too painful to rewatch for my Caryl loving heart.  

Anywho.  

When Daryl and Carol come upon that cabin in the woods, Daryl’s flashbacks begin.  They’re hazy around the edges and not as clearly defined as the moments he spends with Carol.  Speaking of the moments he spends with Carol, how coincidinky that so many of them echo his moments with Leah?  Or do we have it all backwards?  Hmm?  

Things are so convoluted sometimes on this fucking show it leads one to question their sanity.  

Let me ramble out a few wild thoughts for you lovelies again and you tell me if I’ve completely lost it, lol.  

What if Dog was simply an orphaned, abandoned Dog that found Daryl in the woods?

What if Daryl followed the trail Dog had traveled in reverse and stumbled upon the cabin?  

What if the cabin was abandoned because Leah was already dead?  What if she’d taken her own life?  What if Daryl saw the cross/grave outside and the picture inside and his grief-stricken brain conjured up a whole tragic story for this woman, this Walker roaming around inside this house, and she became his coping mechanism?  You know.  Kind of like Rick did Lori when he had his own break with reality.  They’ve all suffered so much, lovelies.  They’ve all got PTSD.  It’s just manifesting in different ways.  

I mean, all of this would fit the label of sad that NR and others have given this little tale.  It would even fit toxic because Daryl let grief and loneliness swallow him for a while.  

As Carol pulls farther away from him, Leah just keeps popping up more and more.  

Daryl essentially loses himself in his own fairy tale only it’s a nightmare painted in soft colors and Leah asking him to choose is basically his own psyche saying to him “do you wanna live here in this fantasy land and numb your pain or do you want to relive the awful reality of Rick being lost and Carol slowly fading from your life day by day?”  And at first he’s like, you can’t make me make that choice because Daryl doesn’t want to give up hope, no matter how futile it seems.  But then Carol makes what she tells him might be her final visit for a while and anger leads Daryl right back to that fucking cabin and oblivion.  Back to the solitude of his tortured thoughts.  

That note, lovelies.  It felt like by choosing Leah he was choosing a lifetime of being alone more than it did him choosing the hope of a new love.  That “find me” for all the world felt like he was willing hope to find him again.  Hope in the form of love in the form of Carol.  

Listen.  I never said this would make sense, lol.  

When Daryl gets back to that cabin, Leah is gone.  Her picture is gone. 

Truly it felt like she’d never been there.  

Even more so when you consider how run down the cabin looks in present day when Daryl and Carol seek shelter in it.  

I can’t help it.  Some small part of me?  Well, it thinks that Daryl told Carol about Leah (whether she existed or not) as a way to both make her feel better than he wasn’t out there in those woods completely alone and to maybe move the needle a little bit on the nature of their own relationship.  Both in the past and present day.  

And while he and Carol are struggling through the ever-shifting nature of their feelings for each other, Daryl has climbed out of his own darkness and found hope again in Judith and RJ.  In the family he’s embraced again. In the communities.  And he’s angry and unsettled because he wants the same for Carol but she doesn’t seem to want that for herself.  

He still wants her to find hope.  

He still wants her to find him.  

He still wants her to find love and peace.  

Help me, lovelies.  These two have broken me, lol.  I promise.  I’m stone cold sober.  A little, okay a lot, tired.  

Wouldn’t it be wild, though?  If Leah really wasn’t what she seemed?  If she were a figment of a broken, lonely man’s tortured imagination?  

Undeniably sad AF but wild all the same.  

[chrichri-chan-18-love]

Love in Darkness (Yandere Yami Marik x Blind Female Reader x Yandere Yami Bakura)

“Quit pulling! I’m the one holding her.” A voice said from behind your back.

“It’s your fault for thinking you can have everything.” Another said from your front side, you could feel their arms around you, their lips on your skin... and the you could feel their auras... they were malicious and evil, just like them.

“I’m the one who met her first, you know!” The voice from behind you said, a possesive tone present, as a pair of lips landed on your neck. For once, you felt lucky that you were blind.

Ever since birth you had been forced into a world of darkness, never knowing what most of the world around you looked like. There were limitations to what smells, sounds and textures could do to ease your resentment for your condition.

Your nightmare started when you had bumped into someone, he said some nasty remarks about you and your sight only to realize that you really couldn’t see anything. Despite being born blind, you had a strong character. You had heard of people that had greater problems and yet showed their true worth. So when you actually became sassy with the guy that had insulted you... you had pretty much sealed your fate. He had spoken in an amused tone and had introduced himself as Bakura.

“Looks like I made an amusing discovery.” He said and you frowned.

“I’m not an item, I’m a person.” You said annoyed and with that left the area, not ever realizing that you had made a terrible mistake.

It had been a few days later that you had met Bakura again, this time though he seemed eager to get to know you. He walked with you, asked you about your life and about your lack of sight... he seemed pleased when he had heard that you had been born blind and had lived your life in darkness. You never told him where you lived or if you worked somewhere... but Bakura took it upon himself to discover it. He had decided that you were amusing, a being that would make a good toy. Though he never would have imagined that there was someone else after you as well.

Your meeting with Marik, took place a few weeks later, it had been similar to your meeting with Bakura. The basic difference was that Marik had seen you from afar, thought that bullying would be entertaining.... then he realized you were blind and actually took a liking to your snarky and sassy attitude. Marik wanted to learn everything about you, creating a fake story to make you like him and slowly listened to you. The more he was around you, the more he realized that he wanted to have you.

It wasn’t long before both males noticed that they had an opponent. The idea of sharing didn’t cross their minds at all as they originally decided to duel it out. However, they later decided that having you choose, would mark the victor of their little game. Which is why they both literally forced their company on you...  but the longer you refused to decide, the more obsessed they became.

“You seriously think that what you do, is called dueling?” Bakura asked mockingly as Marik glared at him. He had long since given in to his dark side, though that did little to help him get to you.

“At least I’ve won against opponents that had some sort of ability. You on the other hand, would loose to a newborn... given that there are brain cells left in your head.” He said with one of his twisted grins, you groanned and decided that you had enough of their arguement that had been going on for a total of three hours so far.

“Do you people live only to duel? There has to be something more interesting than a card game.” You replied and both stared at you shocked as you just went ahead, both smirked, seeing as you had no idea of the forces that you were hanging around with.

After two months, both males had been completely infatuated with you. Their obsession had also the bonus delusion... in their minds, you were something that they could give their dark, malicious hearts to and receive the warmth that your existence added to their darkness. By this point, they could see that fighting for you was pointless and, there was no way the could destroy each other without upsetting you... so they eventually found a nice old house, trapped the owner in the shadow realm and decided to use this place as their lovenest. And after that... you made the mistake of actually asking to see the house they said they had recently “bought”.

“ So, go ahead. Explore every room and tell us what you think.” Bakura said and you foolishly did just that. After a while you sat down and they sat next to you.

“So, what do you think?” Marik asked and you smiled.

“ It feels like a nice place to stay. I like it.”

“Good, then I’ll just bring your things over tomorrow.” Bakura replied and you frowned.

“My things? Why would you bring my things here? This is your house after all.”

“Not anymore. From this day forth this is OUR house.” Marik said as his lips landed on your neck with Bakura joining him seconds later. Both men groaned as they tasted your skin, finally able to let their desire of you to take over. Needless to say, they went all the way through with you that day, they would take turns as to who would pleasure you and who you would pleasure in return. When night fell, you were a fucked up mess that was kept by two lunatics filled with lust and a twisted sense of love. 

And now, both were once again fighting over who would hold you for the day. Whatever mission they individually had was kept outside of this house, when they were in here, the only thing that mattered was you.

“Hey (Name), who do you want to pleasure you first? Me or mister three eyes?” Bakura asked, licking the shell of your ear, Marik left a low growl as he pulled you closer, his face burried in your breasts. 

You didn’t answer, whenever you spoke and chose either of them, you’d end up in pain. Your body had been covered in bite marks and bruises, some were old and some were new. However, over the weeks you had spent trapped here, you’d get yelled at and at times they’d pull your hair or slap you if you showed preferences. Both Marik and Bakura were competitive... and so having you decide between them would unsurprisingly lead to disaster. 

“Looks like we’ll figure out by how loud she’ll get.” Marik said as he moved upwards, forcing his lips and tongue on yours. The only thing you could do was cry, even if you wanted to fight you knew it’d be pointless... escaping was nothing more than an illusion. 

As far as these two continued to “love” you, the only thing that was certain, was a world of darkness, lust and agony. A world from which you’d never escape for as long as they wanted. 

[notbang]

the pursuit of happiness

or, an examination of happiness and the chase as recurring motifs in the character development of Rebecca Bunch and Nathaniel Plimpton

rethaniel appreciation week day 2 → pursuit

I could write a small novel cataloguing the endless parallels between these two—I have, in fact, thought about attempting it many times—but honestly the list is so long and varied and sprouts off in so many different directions that I’ve yet to think of a logical way to go about it. Which is why for the time being, I’m choosing to focus instead—in some degree of detail—on this particular mirrored thread between them.

As our protagonist, Rebecca functions as a major catalyst for change in West Covina, and just as surely as she stumbles along in her journey we see the (for the most part) positive effects of her friendship on those around her. With perhaps the sole exception of White Josh, all of the characters end the show as happier and healthier iterations of themselves, with many of the major aspects of their growth traceable to their involvement with Rebecca in some way. Nathaniel is no exception to this rule; arguably, his development, more so than any other character’s, is directly tied to Rebecca’s influence on his life. The main difference here lies in the fact that he moves to town good a season and half after her—putting him that much further behind in his inevitable development.

One of the major, ongoing setbacks Rebecca faces over the course of the show is her tendency to conflate happiness, or personal fulfilment, with romantic love, and more specifically, for the first half of the series at least, conflating it with a single person. Nathaniel, by comparison, at the time of our introduction to him, has little interest in the concept at all, something Rebecca is quick to sympathise with in 2x09—‘You know Nathaniel, I used to be a lot like you. Ruthless. But then one day I was crying a lot, and I decided to flip things around. Decided to put happiness before success. And when I did that, the world rewarded me with true happiness.’ Nathaniel doesn’t verbally dismiss the sentiment, but the wealth of facial expressions he supplies in response suggest what he thinks of that: happiness is frivolous, and he doesn’t have space for it in his busy schedule.

Nathaniel, probably: Sounds fake but okay.

In the season two theme Rebecca declares that as a girl in love, she can’t be held responsible for her actions, and the sweeping duet Nothing Is Ever Anyone’s Fault follows a similar thread of eschewing culpability. While this certainly works to help dismiss a season’s worth of questionable behaviour from the two of them—including, but not limited to, infidelity and conspiracy to murder—I’m not convinced the touted concept behind the song—that Nathaniel has learned the wrong lesson from being in love with her, as explained in post-finale interviews at the time—flies in the face of our understanding of Nathaniel’s character thus far. As a rich, straight, white, cis male whose privilege the show has only made clumsy attempts at dismantling, a disregard of consequence seems a lot less like something he needed to be taught by anybody and a little more like something that was probably ingrained in him at birth.

If we want to talk about misguided takeaways within their relationship, though, their relationship to happiness is the perfect place to start. Nathaniel begins the show with no concept of the pursuit of happiness, so it makes sense that when he does adopt an interest in it, he takes a page right out of the book of the person that introduced him and pins it all in the one place. Unlike Rebecca, though, Nathaniel’s preoccupation seems to be less wilful delusion and more of a case of ignorance being bliss—being with her feels good, so why change anything or interrogate the situation any further? For all his earlier talk, he is quick to give up the thrill of the chase under the hedonistic guise of contentment. Unfortunately, what he lacks is the emotional intelligence to navigate the implications of Rebecca’s disorder, highlighted by his belief that the mere fact that he and Josh are two vastly different people is reason enough for him to be able to dismiss her obsessive behaviour as ‘cute’ and ‘flattering’. Rebecca’s recent breakdown and consequential suicide attempt can’t exist as warning signs in their (what he perceives as superior) relationship because he isn’t planning on leaving Rebecca at the altar; he isn’t privy to the realisation that it ‘wasn’t about Josh, and maybe it never was’.

Nathaniel: I don’t want to get in the way of your therapy thing, but isn’t the point of all this to be happy? We’re happy. That’s what matters.

It’s a shame because despite there being so much more going on with Rebecca than Nathaniel is capable of comprehending at this point in time, he actually, perhaps entirely by accident, manages to get a few things right—he checks in with her about her therapy when her appearing on his doorstep contradicts the information she’d given him earlier (even if he is, at this point, all too easy to convince), counters her suggestion that they play hooky at Raging Waters with the compromise of a more sensibly scheduled dinner they’ll both enjoy, and, when they do come in to conflict over her obsessive behaviours, takes some time for himself before having a serious conversation with her. Though it’s certainly naive of him to think it’s a problem as easily solved as getting Rebecca to promise she’ll never do anything like this again, it suggests the capacity exists (given, with great guidance) for him to approach Rebecca’s mental illness within their relationship in a thoughtful way.

(This of course completely ignores the inherent issues in their boss/employee relationship, which come to a questionable forefront when Rebecca makes the decision to return to work after having broken things off, but we’re starting to get a little off-track from the intended scope of this discussion.)

The idea of romantic love as a chase—if not already sold to us by Rebecca literally moving across the country in pursuit of Josh—is hammered home most effectively in episode 2x11, but Nathaniel actually brings it up in the episode prior; before Rebecca and Josh leave for New York, at the same time as setting up the whole ‘man of my dreams’ idea that also carries on into the next episode, a sweaty Nathaniel beseeches Rebecca to imitate a land-based predator so he can amp up his workout under the threat of chase. Within this alignment, Josh, who ends up proposing to Rebecca at the end of 2x10, becomes even more clearly representative of an end goal—love, marriage, and, as an expected by-product, ultimate happiness. Nathaniel, by contrast for the time being, is all about the chase that comes before. After his speech at the beginning of 2x11 boasting of his dogged approach when securing clients, his passionate buzz words begin to permeate Rebecca’s subconscious, with ‘pursuit’ in particular going so far as to in an echo in a similar way that ‘happy’ does in the pilot. Such is the effect of his words on her that she parrots them back to Josh when she tells him she’s moved up their wedding—‘Finally, it’s coming to an end. The pursuit is over and I just want to celebrate that’. The title of the episode title may pose the question Josh is the man of my dreams, right? but in the most literal sense, the star of her dreams becomes Nathaniel, along with his personal brand of terminology.

Where Nathaniel thinks life is all about playing the hunter, Rebecca insists she doesn’t care for the chase, which makes sense—she doesn’t want to be chasing Josh, and furthermore, admitting that she’s chasing him would only be contradictory to her belief that they belong together. She wants her happy ending. She wants to arrive at her final destination—her destiny—because thus far all her journeys (which have in actuality been more of a kind of stagnation) have been left her unfulfilled. However obsessing over an idealised future only postpones her happiness with her inability to focus on the present. Ironically, the point at which she makes an active choice to begin shifting that focus—in 3x07, when Dr Shin encourages her to live in the messy in-between—is right around the time Nathaniel starts buying into her idealisation himself.

In a similar way to Rebecca, regardless of his purported love of the pursuit, Nathaniel’s infatuation is seemingly tied to the concept of a destination—several times quite literally. In 3x04 he’s ready to whisk her away to Rome to evade any obstacles to their being together, and in 4x01 proposes a similar escape to Hawaii, causing him to lash out when Rebecca turns him down—‘I want us to just be happy and be together. That’s what I want. You just said you love me, right? So can you just do that for me? Can you just stop overthinking everything? …seems like every time we’re happy, you try to ruin it.’ He sees their shared happiness as a nirvana state he’s caught a glimpse of that Rebecca is now determined to deny him access to, to the point that he seeks to make their version of a love bubble a physical one, where no outside interference (or, more accurately, internal reflection from Rebecca) can keep them apart. Still degrees behind Rebecca in the parallel arcs of their development, he’s stuck in the mindset that them being happy and in love is the only thing that matters. His behaviour is far from flattering, but with a quick review of his history of being on the continual receiving end of her rejection, it’s not entirely difficult to see where he’s coming from.

(As an aside, Rebecca’s relationship with the destination versus the journey as it pertains to the mural on her wall is something I’ve already discussed in a previous meta.)

When she breaks up with him at the beginning of 3x09, Rebecca responds to Nathaniel’s protest of ‘but we’re happy!’ with the qualifier that she’s ‘happy, but it isn’t real’, which probably isn’t the most pleasant thing to be told, even before you factor in Nathaniel’s implied inexperience with serious relationships. While her behaviour prior to this definitely calls for some self reflection, it’s an interesting backflip from extreme infatuation to sudden dismissal, and while it does align with the black and white thinking associated with BPD, it’s easy to see why Nathaniel feels blindsided and, consequently, spurned. She begged him not to break up with her not only to then turn around do exactly that, but to also (presumably unintentionally) throw in the humiliating implication he cared more than she did.

Dr Akopian: Maybe now you can see that your father’s behaviour in the past has set a pattern for you, seeking the love of men who don’t fully love you back. Who you have to pursue. Men who are taken or emotionally unavailable. Like your father. Like Josh. Like Greg. Like other men, I’m sure.

Nathaniel is an outlier amongst the three main love interests in that, for all his grandstanding about humans being hunters by nature, he’s the one constantly falling over himself to win Rebecca’s affection rather than the other way around; it’s ironic that the love interest that asserts himself as being all about the chase is the one that ends up later having to assign himself the title of ‘king of declarations’ based on his ongoing habit of blurting out to Rebecca how he feels, never achieving the level of emotional standoffishness he hopes to exude. Nathaniel’s unavailability—and subsequent cementing as one of the types of men Dr Akopian calls Rebecca out on being predisposed to pursuing—comes only when he enters into a relationship with Mona, and Rebecca, who supposedly ‘never cared for the chase’, with interest reignited finds a skewed sense of security afforded by the romantic roadblock, something Nathaniel seems to understand on some unspoken level, as hinted at by his eagerness to maintain the fragile status quo of their morally questionable arrangement.

As a result of this subversion of power dynamics within Rebecca and Nathaniel’s relationship, in amongst the many other parallels between them that only serve to support this, it starts to become apparent that, narratively speaking, Nathaniel is to Rebecca as Rebecca is to Josh, something that is visually co-signed by the show during 4x03, when we see the same golden glow of romantic epiphany crest behind Rebecca in the church during her speech at Heather and Hector’s wedding that suffuses across Josh when Rebecca encounters him in the streets of New York.

Nathaniel’s takeaway from Rebecca’s speech is that because he loves her, he should do everything within his power to get her back, which of course leads to his (frankly embarrassing) attempts to manipulate her and win her over in 4x04. (Fittingly enough to this discussion, the opening line of the Slumbered quote he plagiarises is ‘you are the only thing that makes me happy’. The irony of his failed use of her teenage diary to win her over is that I honestly do believe the speech is an accurate summation of how he sees Rebecca, and had he only chosen to put it in his own words, that final scene between them might have played out a little differently.) The part he probably should have focused on, though, is the part Rebecca is currently pouring all her professional energy into (and not so coincidentally, it’s right there in the episode title)—love (and therefore happiness) being about finding your own path.

Rebecca: I don’t believe in destiny anymore. I just believe in taking responsibility for your own happiness.

This is not the first time Nathaniel makes the decision to actively pursue Rebecca while her attention lies firmly fixed elsewhere. In 3x03 and 3x04, he is forced to grapple with his feelings alone when a distracted Rebecca eventually goes where he cannot follow, putting an abrupt end to any potential for chase when she flees back to New York in 3x05. Consequently, Nathaniel embarks on a mini-arc of struggling to accept the idea that Rebecca may never come back—initially incomprehensible to him, owing to the fact that she bears importance to him, personally—to conceding that his (thus far relatively unexamined) need for her to be in his life is secondary to her own wellbeing, something that acts as a precursor to a major thread in Nathaniel’s (often one step forward, two clumsily-written steps back) character development in the back end of the series.

Nathaniel: I just hope wherever she is, she’s happy.

In 4x11, Nathaniel’s dream world amalgamation of Maya and Rebecca begs him to let her be happy, and as the former fades into the latter we get another callback to the pilot—an echo of 'happy, happy, happy…’ reminiscent of the empty shell of New York Rebecca latching onto Josh’s description of laid-back West Covina. Unlike its instance in the 1x01, however, this is a wake up call of an entirely different kind—it is not the blossoming of a brand new delusion but the sobering dissolution of one. And unlike the speech a radiant Rebecca gave at Heather’s wedding about finding the one you love and holding on tight, this particular iteration is here to impart the contradictory wisdom ‘if you really love me, you have to let me go’.

Nathaniel: I want you to be happy, I do.

This moment is arguably the true beginning of Nathaniel’s lesson that his happiness isn’t necessarily (or in this case, due to the current circumstances, can no longer be) inextricably linked to Rebecca—she has the opportunity to find happiness independently of him and that in itself is something that should make him happy, as someone that loves and cares for her. His assertion to dream Rebecca that he wants her to be happy manifests in his concession to Rebecca in the real world—‘I’m glad you’re happy. I really am. And it makes me happy too’—an exchange that echoes two similar moments between them back in season three, during which Rebecca expresses the same sentiment regarding his relationship with Mona, first following the cool down from their 3x10 conflict, and again in the aftermath of their ended affair in 3x13: 

Rebecca: I’m happy that you found someone else. Mona seems lovely.

Rebecca: I’m happy for you… I want you to be happy.

The more interesting callback here though, of course, is to Rebecca’s conversation with Greg at the duck pond way back in 2x02. After finally tracking down an AWOL Greg with the intention of breaking the news of her involvement with Josh, Greg makes peace with the situation by way of reassuring them both that everything worked out fine as long as Rebecca is happy. ‘You and Josh—you should be happy together. You’re happy, right? And he treats you well?’ Rebecca responds to this in the affirmative, though her expression—and the context of the episode—belies her answer. In contrast, her exchange with Nathaniel goes a little differently:

Nathaniel: Because you’re happy, right? You’re happy with Greg. Rebecca: I mean, I don’t know. I’m not there yet. But I could possibly be, yeah.

The evolution of Rebecca’s response is of course evidence of her development as a character and her own understanding of her relationship to happiness, but what I find most noteworthy is not that she lies in 2x02, but that in 4x11 she chooses to tell an unusual truth. She could just have easily have said yes the second time around and it would have functioned as a clear enough juxtaposition of what she considers close enough to happiness; after all, at the time of 4x11 she and Greg believe they are approaching their relationship in a mature and thoughtful fashion, they are warm and affectionate towards one another and, unlike in 2x02, she is not having to compete for her partner’s attention. She would, by all accounts, be completely justified in giving what could be considered the normal response to being posed such a question—that yes, she is happy with Greg. So even though it’s encouraging to hear Rebecca verbalising her newfound knowledge that happiness is so much more than such a simple dichotomy of yes and no, it feels significant that Nathaniel, as a person currently knee-deep in untangling his own complicated relationship with happiness, is the one that gets to be privy to this particular brand of truth.

And while it can be argued that all the strides Nathaniel makes in 4x11 are undone over the course of the following episodes, setting aside the very real fact that human emotions are fickle, and we can’t always stick as completely to our guns as we’d like, his blessing here still comes with a telling caveat: ‘I’ve got to let you go… because you’re happy’. And who shows up on Nathaniel’s doorstep during 4x12 to poke holes in that perceived state of happiness between her and Greg? None other than Rebecca herself.

Rebecca: You just want me to be happy, which is what I want too, and god, Greg… Greg doesn’t know what happiness is.

Such is the shared significance of this concept of happiness between them that the second Rebecca alludes to their conversation in the foyer, Nathaniel’s previously good-natured, albeit slightly confused, response to her drunken presence in his apartment quickly and very clearly dissolves into alarm bells and he eventually sends her on her way. Though he could easily have wielded Rebecca’s visit as a weapon to create dissonance between her and Greg in 4x13, he merely probes for clues by way of a convoluted metaphor, resigning himself to the fact that the issue has been resolved, while Greg, in actuality, is at this point none the wiser. It’s only once Greg himself tells Nathaniel that it is over between him and Rebecca that Nathaniel returns to entertaining his feelings for her.

Though we the viewers are all too aware (and at this point, probably screaming at the TV!) that Rebecca’s happiness is not, contrary to recurring belief, a vacant role that she needs someone to fill; unlike us, the characters have not had the good fortune of being able to watch the show Crazy Ex Girlfriend on the CW network. Nathaniel is still a fledgling in terms of self enlightenment, and it makes total sense for him to be nudged towards into pursuing her again once the clearest obstacle to her affections—her relationship with Greg—is no longer an issue.

When she breaks the news of her decision to Nathaniel in the finale, Rebecca is quick to assure Nathaniel that ‘the times that [they’ve] spent together have been some of the best of [her] life’, which is an interestingly bold statement all on its own, but it feels somewhat satisfyingly like finally giving Nathaniel a real-life answer to the ‘we’ve had such happy moments, you and I, haven’t we?’ that he throws at his Maya-shaped projection of Rebecca in 4x11; affirmation that contrary to what she says in 3x08, something in there between them was real.

‘You only get one life,’ he tells her in return. ‘And you’ve got to live that the way you want.’

Neither of them uses the word ‘happy’ in this exchange, but as we fast forward in time, we get:

Nathaniel: Happy to be here.

Rebecca: For the first time in my life, I am truly happy.

Nathaniel (who in an amusing reflection in 2x09, reveals that he, in a roundabout way, moved to West Covina because of Rebecca—‘it’s kind of your fault that I’m here’) has finally made the actual change that Rebecca taunted him with on their first meeting. And unlike Rebecca, he’s had a chance to interrogate what happiness for himself, removed from another person, might look like before he does so. Rather than starting with a life-altering change, he gets to make incremental changes along the way—which very much are tied to his entanglement to Rebecca—in order to make a more meaningful and deliberate life change for himself later on.

“When you find someone that melts the iceberg that is your heart…” - 3x03

“Provoking me, and zinging me, and challenging my world view. And warming my heart.” - 3x04

“You make me feel like I can be a different kind of person.” - 3x08

“You’ve awakened my heart and unlocked my soul.” - 4x04

“You’ve changed my whole life. Who I am, who I can be.” - 4x11

Rebecca describes her moving to West Covina in Nathaniel’s first episode as ‘[deciding] to flip things around. [Deciding] to put happiness before success. And when I did that, the world rewarded me with true happiness.’ In the finale, she tells the audience how he, by comparison, ‘upended [his] life’—‘You changed everything. But unlike me, you did it for the right reasons. And I am in awe of you.’ Alongside the nice progression from her proclamation in 2x09 that she ‘came to West Covina to search for happiness’ to her more self-aware announcement at the open mic that ‘for the first time in my life, [she is] truly happy’, (which feels like a subversive callback to a certain infamous butter commercial) we also get a reiteration of the sentiment— ‘I came to this town to find love. And I did. I love every person in this room’—that conflates happiness with love in what is now a healthy and satisfying way. It’s the perfect twist that she’s rewarded with the thing she was searching for all along just as soon as she realises she was looking in all the wrong places, and that the place itself still gets to play such a large part in that. And she is able to see Nathaniel’s journey as all the more meaningful in light of her own missteps along the way.

While I have my reservations on the bow they tied Nathaniel’s arc in for the finale (because despite Rebecca’s realisation that there is no such thing as ‘ending up’, there is in the sense of the scope of this series) being a well thought out resolution as opposed to leaning on a previous gag without laying any actual groundwork, the truth is it’s unclear what the true nature of Nathaniel’s sabbatical is/was/will be—mere extended vacation, permanent new career path, or just the initial spark of inspiration in some extended self discovery. That being said, much like Rebecca evolving towards a point where she can appreciate the interconnectedness of love and happiness in a less troublesome way, it is neat that Nathaniel’s resolution follows on from his tendency to want to escape to far-off destinations in an attempt to control his desired status quo. Though his fleeing town is still inextricably linked to having his heart broken by Rebecca, Guatemala, for once, isn’t about transposing his current circumstance to another place in order to cling to something, but rather a carefully selected, specific site for welcomed change.

Independent of any potential that may or may not exist between them as the show closes out—romantic or otherwise—it’s undeniable that these two characters have left indelible marks on each other, and without their respective involvement in each other’s lives, their journeys—and resulting transformations—would not have been the same.

[javisjeanjacket]

Exile - (poe dameron x fem!reader)

Folklore Series Part 1 /4

A/N: who doesn’t love a bit of yearning in the evening?? this one is inspired by Taylor Swift’s new song, ‘Exile’. If I used your gif or photo in my collage, let me know and I will add your tag! :)

Warnings: cursing, yearning, alcohol reference, poe dameron is in it so there should be a thirst warning as well

Word count: 2K

"Excellent work, the First Order's work on light speed tracking will be extremely valuable if we can crack their hextacryption. Go ahead and return to base." Leia's voice crackled over the holodisplay. 

"General, I thought I was assigned to Coruscant permanently." You said, your eyebrows pursed in concern.

Leia chuckled. "I wish we had the money to keep you there permanently. Come back to base and the team will decide where your next deployment will be. May the Force be with you." The gray-haired woman bowed her head and the holodisplay vanished. 

You stuffed the holoprojector in your back pocket as your chest tightened. You blinked several times, trying to force your emotions to sort themselves out. 

Speeders, cargo ships, and public transports zoomed outside your tiny hotel room viewport. For a moment, it struck you how every one of those creatures in every one of those vehicles had a life as rich and flawed as your own. 

Your mind wandered to Poe Dameron; lost somewhere in the stars so very far away from you. Your fingers absentmindedly grazed over the top of your wrist and for a fleeting moment, you were able to convince yourself it was Poe's hand on your skin. 

The communicator on the nightstand beeped, pulling you from your delusion, and resounded, "Transport arriving at 21:04." 

Taking a steadying breath, you looked once more over the hotel room that had become your home during your work on the city planet. Your mind filled with memories of nights not too long past; how your body had curled into the thin sheets and how violently your fingers had clenched the pillow tucked to your chest. Flashes of nightmares zipped through your mind as did the many nights spent with your heart drowning in tears and alcohol. 

A deep loneliness washed over you, pushing your heart to jump and yelp against your rib cage. 

Your eyes felt heavy and hot tears pricked at the sides of them as you began to gather your clothes from the small closet in the corner of the room. Haphazardly stuffing them in your rucksack, your mind did not have to work hard to envelop you completely. 

Ripped from some hiding spot deep within, the memory of Poe's hand on your back sending shivers across your skin, now spun on display in the front of your thoughts. His smile beaming in the sunlight. How soft his lips were on your cheek every morning, the sweet must of your bodies intertwined. The wave of his hair curling away from his face. The fire in his eyes and in his footsteps. 

The feelings still living inside of you for Poe Dameron; so long harbored and so long neglected, moved with a fury to invigorate your feeble heart. Beating against your chest, the muscle threatened to shatter all over again. 

Reality reminded you of the last time you had seen the pilot; the red rings around his deep brown eyes and his hand tracing his lips, frustrated. How hot the fire inside your chest had burned, how utterly defeated you had felt. How the feeling of your words, heavy as stones in your mouth, still filled you with regret. 

The way his face had twisted in pain, how taken aback he was. Poe, for as much as you loved him, could never seem to hear you out. In his mind, he felt that he could make things the way he wanted them to be, just by his sheer will and determination. To him, Poe Dameron was the end all, be all of his own destiny. And, to an extent, he was right, but when it came to other people he struggled with the notion that to have them in his life, it meant he actually had to have them in his life. 

You dropped your head to your chest and wiped a warbling tear from your eye.

One of your favorite shirts wrapped around your hand; absentmindedly you had strangled it. 

You stuffed the shirt into your bulging bag and zipped it closed.

Taking a deep breath, you flicked your eyes to the clock on your bedside table. 

'21:03' It displayed. Swallowing against a dry throat, you picked your rucksack up from the floor and left your hotel room, the lock clicking firmly behind you. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You didn't know what you expected to feel, coming back to Base after months away, but it wasn't this. 

You sat upright in the pilot's chair of your ship, your back straight against the cushion behind you and your knees pushed tightly together. Nausea rose in the back of your throat and you had to force it back down. 

The Resistance Base came into view and your heart leapt from your chest and into your hands. Your fingertips seemed to glow, drunk on a cocktail of adrenaline and anxiety. Your own words echoed around your mind, 'I think that it's best if you just leave me alone.' 'When I'm with you, I can't stop myself from trying to pretend that I don't feel the way I do.' 

'Do I still feel that way?' You interrupted yourself.

Mindlessly, your fingers began to prep the landing sequence.

'I'll have to see him. I can be civil. I'm sure I was just being dramatic.'  Your eyes settled over the Resistance flight techs moseying in your direction, half hoping to recognize a face on one of them.

Taking a deep breath and hurrying through the ship to gather your things, you met the landing dock as it lowered to the ground beneath you. You nodded a greeting and smiled softly to the techs hurrying towards your ship, asking if you needed fuel or repairs. 

A familiar astromech droid's beeping pulled your attention to your shin. 

You smiled broadly at the little orange and white ball droid, squealing as you bent down to rub his sides. "BB-8!" You exclaimed. "Oh, I missed you buddy!" 

The droid moved back and forth excitedly and beeped rapidly, firing off a story just too important not to tell you. 

You nodded, fully unaware of what he was saying, but happy to see him so happy nonetheless. The droid finished his spewing and began to whir back to the compound, towards the one person you did not want to see, you assumed. 

"BB-8!" You called, not wanting to hurt the little droid's feelings by abandoning him. "I'm going to find Leia."

The droid's visual receptor widened and then narrowed. His system was processing why you didn’t choose the most logical thing to do after being away from Poe for so many months. 

You smiled gently at the droid and headed towards the bustling Base entrance. Resistance members hurried past you, chatting to each other, pointing harshly with eyebrows furrowed, and others laughing heartily. 

The path through the D'Qar Base was easy and memorized, your boots clacking on the metallic floor below steadily. You shouldered your rucksack closer to you and squeezed through the frantic hallway. Nerves wrapped their hands around your stomach, flipping it over and over again. Your eyes scanned the hordes of people, unconsciously searching for the face of the Resistance's most valuable pilot. You made your way into the war room where you spotted Leia's heather gray hair hovering over a holodisplay table. Close by though, a familiar black mop of unruly curls moved from one side of the room to the other. His voice carried through the din and his finger pointed to something on the holodisplay. 

Suddenly, your legs were planted where you stood. You could feel them tremble and your breathing hitch on it's way out. Half of you screamed, 'Run! Run!' and the other half felt as if it would never move again.

'Well, I can't very well run away now, people have seen me.'

Taking several short breaths in, you moved your gaze from Poe to Leia. Setting your shoulders back and sticking your chin out defiantly, you moved through the clusters of Resistance intel officers to General Organa. 

She and Poe both had their backs to you, Poe still explaining his thoughts.

"General Organa." You said, your chest out proudly.

Leia turned to face you and her features softened.

At the sound of your voice, Poe whipped around from the star chart in front of him and his mouth gaped slightly. 

You could feel how hot his gaze burned on your face, but you dared not to meet his eyes and satisfy him. 

Leia greeted you and ran her hands up your forearms. "I'm so glad you're back safely. The intel you brought us was invaluable."

You smiled at her as your thoughts began to pound against your skull, 'Look at him, look at him, look at him.' 

"Thank you, Leia." You answered. 

"Poe," Leia began and turned to your ex-boyfriend.

Anxiety rose up in your chest and your eyes moved back and forth between the two of them frantically.

"Will you make sure your friend here makes it to her quarters alright? I can finish up here without you." She looked between the two of you with a knowing look on her face.

"Oh, General, that's not-" You began.

Leia held up a jewel-clad hand. "I'm sure you two have a lot to talk about." 

Your eyes finally met Poe's and you could almost feel yourself tripping into them again.

Poe's face was set, his curiosity now turned to steeliness. He pulled his eyes from yours and looked down at his boots. His hands rested on his hips underneath his flightsuit, and the tension in his shoulders seemed to snap it's fangs at you. He looked up at you again, his chest beating shallowly, and then turned to walk down the corridor you had entered through. His frustration trailed after him, bouncing and wailing like a child pouting. 

You clutched the strap of your bag and kept your head down, your eyes following the up and down of Poe's scuffed boots through the hallway. 

He turned and lead you down a darkened corridor, and as well as you could remember, it was no longer used because of the unsafe door panel wiring.

Your eyebrows scrunched and you could feel a shudder in your chest as you realized why he had brought you this way. The best pilot in the Resistance wanted closure. 

Poe's lean body turned around to face you. His bottom lip tucked into his mouth and his eyes scanned the hallway behind you, his senses heightened by the surprise of seeing you. 

"Look," He began, his arms crossed over his chest. His voice was just as you remembered it. Just as you had heard it so many times before. 

A burning desire to hear your name in his mouth again, to hear him shape you with his tongue, rose in your chest. 

"We gotta talk about what happened. If you're gonna be here, I need to know how to be around you." His dark eyes had an unrelenting hold on yours. In the dim light of the hallway, shadows played across his face, painting him in darkness almost overwhelming. 

"I don't know what you want me to say." You choked out. A muscle behind your eye twitched. 

"Do you want me to not talk to you and avoid you in the halls or what? What do you want?" Poe's voice was laced with frustration. You could sense a deep melancholy in him and the anger guarding it carefully.

"No, Poe, I-" You sighed and tucked your shaking hands into your back pockets. "You don't have to do that." 

"Then, what?" He spat. His arms flung outwards to emphasize the end of his question. He was trying to keep his voice quiet but his passion kept pushing him upwards. 

"Why don't you tell me what you want." You said, his frustration frustrating you.

Poe chuckled indignantly. "What I want? What do I want?" He took a step back and turned from you. "Do you even remember what we were like?" 

You gritted your teeth as you blinked hot tears away from your eyes. Of course, you remembered. The secret dates off-planet, the way he would run to wherever you were to give you a goodbye kiss before leaving on mission, no matter how quickly he needed to take off. How could you forget?

"I remember everything." You whispered. 

Poe's face scanned over yours, searching for what you meant to say. His jaw set and his chest heaved shallowly. His head tilted to the side, looking at you. The skin around his eyes softened. 

"Then...what happened?" He asked tenderly. 

"I ...I loved you every day we were together." You admitted. The words nestled for so many months in your heart now taking off and flying on their own.

"It was real for me, whatever we were. But..." You shook your head, your eyes keeping Poe's hostage. "I don't think it was for you." 

Poe reached a shaking hand out to touch your face. His skin kissed your cheek and your eyes shut involuntarily, a relief you didn't know you needed. "I never could read your mind, could I?" He chuckled lightly. 

One side of your face turned upwards and your throat burned at the tears yanking at your eyes. 

His thumb wandered to graze down your chin and then to rest around your jaw. "I missed you every day we were apart. I pretended like I didn't but...you never gave me a warning sign. I never understood what happened." His eyes fell to your lips and his body seemed to freeze in place there. 

You shook your head and pulled yourself out of his ensnaring grasp. "Poe, I gave you every sign that I could. I told you every day, a million little times, that I was going to leave. You just didn't want to hear me."

The pilot sighed heavily and his eyes watered. "Can we just...try again? Do you," He sighed again and looked back up to your eyes. "Do you still feel the same way about me?"

You pulled your top lip into your mouth and drug it across your teeth, the pain a welcome release of the mounting pressure inside you. "We've both seen this Holofilm before, and neither of us liked the ending. It's time to let go." The harshness of your own words ripped your throat to shreds, but you kept your lips firmly shut. 

"And what if I can't let go?" Poe asked, his tone clipping at the end of his unspoken deceleration. His body moved closer to yours and his wide palm reached to hold the small of your back.

Looking up into Poe’s hazel eyes and feeling his muscles tensing around your body again sent a wave of light-headedness through your mind.

"I think I can find my quarters on my own, Commander. Thank you for your help." Your voice broke as you pushed yourself out of Poe's grasp and headed towards the women's sleeping quarters. You kept your eyes trained on the ground below as you tainted it with hot tears, plopping and splashing against the cool metal of the Resistance base floor.

~~~~~~~~~~~

What did you think? I really hope you enjoyed reading my work. Just your liking / re-blogging it means a lot. If you have a moment, I would love to hear your thoughts! Tell me what you think via my ask box or a comment always warms my heart!! Thank you again for reading!

Need more reading material? You can visit my Masterlist for more Poe Dameron content, as well as my other works.

Want to be kept in the loop? Let me know so I can put your handle in my taglist form. Right now, I’m writing for Poe Dameron, Din Djarin, and Santiago ‘Pope’ Garcia, but I have plans to expand my SW character list, and eventually add in my favorites from the MCU as well.

Thanks again for reading! Sending love! -hai

[loving-jack-kelly]

For I Have Sinned

It was a game he’d played since he was a kid.

Bless me Father, for I have sinned.

Confession was an art form. A game of how close he could get to spelling it out without actually telling anybody his secrets.

And Matt was good at it.

He knew other people played the game, too. He didn’t mean to listen to other people’s confessions, but, especially when he was younger and didn’t have full control of his senses, it was unavoidable.

He wasn’t a priest, far from it, but he considered himself bound by the seal of confession as much as any priest was. Anything he heard, it didn’t matter. They were absolved, they had repented, and even though Matt knew what they had done, it didn’t matter anymore.

But he heard them play the same game he did. Dodging around the details, skirting the edges, not lying, exactly, but not telling the full truth, either. Maybe it was human nature; even while performing a sacrament with the purpose of confessing everything, it was easier to evade the truth. Easier to be absolved of something vague than to dig down and expose everything to the dim light and still air of the confessional. Easier to trust that God knew what was in your heart and if the priest knew enough to grant you penance, confession had served its purpose regardless of if the confessor had spilled every detail of their sin.

For Matt, it felt like survival.

He needed to confess, to bare his soul as much as he could force himself to. It felt good, it kept him grounded and strong in his faith, and he needed that. Even so, even with a priest bound before God to keep Matt’s secrets, he was wary of saying too much.

Bless me Father, for I have sinned.

His head tilted towards the floor, Matt could hear the priest’s breath. His heart. The way his hands settled in his lap, brushed against his robe.

Matt didn’t know this priest. He’d known Father Lantom, and Father Lantom had known him. Father Lantom had known how to pick apart Matt’s confessions and give advice that was exactly what Matt needed without Matt going into more detail.

This new priest did not.

He was kind. Younger than Father Lantom, and rather naive to Hell’s Kitchen, if his homilies were anything to go by, but he was kind. He’d made a point of greeting Matt, and he listened to Matt’s confessions and offered advice and penance, but it was clear that he didn’t understand. He hadn’t picked up on the patterns that Father Lantom had had memorized.

Which was only to be expected. Father Lantom had know Matt his entire life, and this new priest had not. He’d known Matt for four months, and Matt was just a little bit complicated for four months of sporadic confession to unravel.

This priest hadn’t seen Matt grow up, hadn’t seen him anywhere but church, and so didn’t know what Matt was hinting at in confession.

Bless me Father, for I have sinned.

Confession wasn’t an easy sacrament. It wasn’t supposed to be. Confession was about baring yourself before the priest and before God. It was about acknowledging the things you’d done wrong, admitting that they were wrong, and that could hurt. It could be ugly, and painful, and as many times as Matt had gone to confession he would never be used to the feeling it brought to the pit of his stomach.

He wasn’t somebody who enjoyed talking about his feelings.

It was always hard to force emotions into words, and even if that wasn’t exactly what confession was about, that was how it felt. Forcing himself to verbalize the guilt that built up over time, to explain the things he’d done.

And yet he still played his game. Got as close to the truth with his words as he dared, but never quite coming out and saying it.

Maybe someday this new priest would figure him out. Guess the secrets he was alluding to, figure out that blind Matt Murdock the parishioner was the devil of Hell’s Kitchen, and realize that the sins Matt confessed to might be a little more extreme than he thought.

But until then, and maybe even after that point, Matt would duck and dodge and avoid, use vague language and make sure to never say anything that could really link him to what he did. Confess to anger, to violence, to hurting his friends and making rash decisions that affected the people around him. Wrapped up nice and neat in slow, well thought out words. Carefully constructed sentences designed to absolve him without outing him.

Maybe that fancy law degree was good for more than business.

Matt wondered if the smile that thought brought him was audible when he started speaking.

Bless me Father, for I have sinned.

Matt suffered under no delusions. He knew that what he was doing was sinful. He knew the itch under his skin, the way adrenaline started pumping at the sound of a good fight, the way he couldn’t help but throw himself head first into danger and starting swinging his fists at the bad guys, he knew it was sin. Maybe pride, maybe anger, maybe something unique to him and the devil inside him, but he knew it was sin.

He also knew he was making a difference. Every week there were fewer and fewer blows to land. There were still a lot, don’t get him wrong, but it seemed like more and more people were seeing his shadow and deciding it wasn’t worth it.

After Dex, it took Matt weeks to put the suit back on.

Not to get back out on the street. Hell’s Kitchen needed him more than anybody wanted to admit, and once Brett had cleared Daredevil’s name, he only had to avoid people as much as he’d ever had to.

But it felt like the suit had been tainted. It didn’t belong only to Matt, anymore, it belonged to the man who’d put it on and killed in it. Even if that man had been manipulated into believing it was all he was good for, that the only thing he was meant to do with his life was murder in somebody else’s name, because of the time that Dex had spent in the suit it had become a warning. An omen. A harbinger of death.

And Matt was not that Daredevil. He may have come close, but the real Daredevil did not and would not ever cross that line. He would not kill.

And so it took time to convince himself to put it back on. To reclaim that piece of himself and what he did.

In those weeks, though, he still went out every night. Dressed in black, taking hits like they were a penance for Dex’s sins, for the marks on the suit’s reputation.

Bless me Father, for I have sinned.

This new priest pitied Matt.

It wasn’t a new thing for Matt to sense. The strange tone in his voice, the way he took and held Matt’s hand for a moment too long every time they greeted each other, the little change in his heartbeat and shift in his breath every time he saw Matt. All things Matt had heard and felt time and time again.

Father Lantom had never pitied him. Maybe because he’d known Matt when he was little, and knew how vicious Matt could be, how he could fight for and take care of himself.

This new priest didn’t know that, hadn’t sat and talked to Matt about fights he’d gotten into when he was ten and hadn’t been there through Matt fighting tooth and nail to force himself into the schools he wanted to go to and the career he wanted to build. He didn’t know how well Matt could take care of himself, and didn’t know what Matt got up to after dark.

Instead, he took in the dark glasses and white cane and decided that Matt was a pitiable creature. No matter that the Matt he <I>did</I> know had graduated Summa Cum Laude from Columbia Law, that the Matt he <I>did</I> know was very much living his own life on his own terms successfully, because Matt was blind and therefore helpless and therefore a parishioner to be pitied and spoken to gently.

He didn’t know Matt well enough to know him by voice alone, though, so when Matt was in confession, he didn’t put on any more of a slow, gentle voice than Matt would expect from any priest in a confessional.

It was easier to talk to him when he wasn’t busy pitying Matt. Easier to gather his thoughts, to exhale and start talking, when he wasn’t trying to guess exactly what each word was making the priest think of him, trying to outthink any extra bits of pity that might emerge if Matt wasn’t careful with choosing his words.

In the confessional, when Matt sat and gathered his thoughts and started talking, he didn’t have to overthink anymore than he usually did, be careful about anything other than keeping his secrets.

Bless me Father, for I have sinned.

It hurt every step of the way, repairing the damage he’d done.

He’d made steps in the right direction, started to explicitly put his trust in Foggy and Karen, to lean on them and make an effort to take in what they had to say, rather than rushing to assume he had to do everything himself.

But he’d broken their trust, time and again, and that took time. It took effort. It took difficult conversions and carefully established boundaries.

It was hard, and it was worth it.

Five months after everything, Nelson, Murdock and Page was getting its feet underneath itself as a law firm, and Nelson, Murdock and Page were finding their way forward as friends.

Matt laughed, hard and long and real, for the first time in a long time five months after everything. At the way Foggy was talking, the jokes he’d made a hundred times before. At the way Karen was trying to hide her amusement behind a hand, trying and failing to avoid egging Foggy’s monologuing on.

And there was alcohol involved, but it wasn’t drunken laughter. It was kind, and funny, and for the first time in a long time, Matt felt the pit of guilt in his stomach from everything he’d put them through release. For the first time in a long time, Matt felt like he wouldn’t be lying if he said everything was going to be okay.

Because it was.

Everything was going to be okay.

It was already almost there.

Bless me Father, for I have sinned.

When Matt was younger, he’d prayed until his knees were raw. Kneeled at his bed, at a pew, and begged for forgiveness he didn’t feel like he deserved, begged for this devil inside him to be taken away, begged to be able to be the man his father had wanted him to be.

It hadn’t worked.

Matt had tried for a very long time to fight the devil inside him away, and it had never worked.

So he’d beaten it into submission instead. Twisted and forced its into something to be used for good, rather than the evil it felt like it wanted to be.

That didn’t mean it was good. He could feel it fighting against him, clawing and biting and trying its best to overcome Matt, to take him over, but he refused. He refused to let it own him. He’d made his decision, he made it every time he had a bad guy under him, out for the count and a few hits away from out for good, and he wasn’t going to change his mind.

He’d let the devil out, but it would be on his terms. In a sharp smile, a scathing remark, a hit placed to hurt more than maybe strictly necessary, but never in a death.

Matt Murdock was many things, many horrible things, but he would never be a murderer.

He would never let the devil out like that, but it still made itself known.

Matt often had a bruise on his face when he sat for confessional. Fresh stitches somewhere on his body, pain radiating from somewhere, and that was a form of penance in and of itself, but it also served as a reminder.

Of the devil inside him and what it was capable of, what <I>he</I> was capable of.

Bless me Father, for I have sinned.

There would never be enough penance to make Matt feel absolved of his sin. He could never say enough Hail Marys, Our Fathers, never spend enough time in prayer. No matter what he did, it never felt like enough.

But he felt lighter. Better. After sitting on the bench, twisting his hands around and around the handle of his cane, forcing himself to exhale and start to speak, forcing himself to confess his sins, even as he played his evasion game like he always did, he walked away feeling better.

That was the purpose of faith, was it not?

Matt believed in God.

Maybe it was because he’d been raised in the church, but that belief was a part of him. He believed in God the father, almighty maker of heaven and earth, and that faith grounded him. It pushed him and urged him onward, motivated him to trust and fight for something better, to believe the best of people and to try to use the system before his fists.

But Matt also believed in the devil.

Every time he saw some new act of human depravity, the darkest example of what humans were capable of, he knew without a doubt that the devil was real.

Maybe there was a piece of it inside everybody.

Maybe some people had defeated it. Managed to do what Matt never could and expel the devil from their bodies so they didn’t have to worry about it anymore.

But Matt hadn’t. Couldn’t.

And so Matt worked with the devil. Accumulated ever more sins to confess, but forced the devil to follow his rules, abide by his choices.

Smiled viciously through the blood dripping from his face before knocking out a criminal who hadn’t tamed the devil inside himself. Took perhaps too much pleasure in being the one who did it, the one who had twisted the devil into following man’s will.

And then he sat for confession, the pain a reminder of what he was here to confess, his grip on his cane a reminder of who he was, and the priest there to bring it all together. To draw out Matt’s breath and his words, and bring him into his faith, and let him leave feeling better.

The devil at rest for once in his life.

Bless me Father, for I have sinned.

The sin was what made him human. The sin was what made everyone human, the reason for everything bad but so much good.

The sin had kept that first little girl safe. Every time Matt heard her laugh it reminded him.

The sin had brought down brought down the Hand. Every time Matt heard the new construction where Midland Circle had been, it reminded him.

The sin had brought down Fisk. Every time Matt heard a whisper of the story on the street it reminded him.

The sin wasn’t good. It was loud and angry and threatened to overwhelm him every time he let the devil come out to play, but Matt beat it back with more force than he beat any criminal. He manipulated it into good things, and refused to let it take control.

He knew who he was.

He was Matthew Michael Murdock. He was a graduate of Columbia Law, a partner at Nelson, Murdock and Page. He was a friend and a neighbor.

All of those things came first. It could be difficult to remember, and painful to execute, but all of those things came before anything else.

He was also Daredevil. He was a vigilante. He was a violent, brutal fighter who operated outside of the law but had lines he would never cross. He was somebody with a strict moral code and a strong enough resolve to stick to it even when the devil roared to be let out.

But first and foremost, he was Matt.

He was somebody working to be better at all of the things he was, and piece by piece it was coming together. He was Matt, and Matt had friends. Matt laughed. Matt shared inside jokes between moments of hard work on a case. Matt trusted his friends with all of himself. Matt was working on forcing himself to ask for help when he needed it.

It hurt. It was painful. It was hard.

Forcing himself to unlearn and work against everything so ingrained in him for so long wasn’t fun.

But it was making him into a person he was proud to be.

Bless me Father, for I have sinned.

But despite the sin, he was okay.

He was Matt Murdock, son of Battlin’ Jack Murdock and son of Hell’s Kitchen. He was a sinner, but he was good.

And that was enough.

To be good was enough.

[arcticdementor]

There are three kinds of dissidents: (a) anons, (b) pundits who still care what people think, and (c) outsiders who DGAF. All these groups are great; real greatness can be achieved in any of them; and good friends I have in each. But each has its problems.

…

The problem with (b) is that you are always policing yourself. Not only do your readers never really know what you really believe—you never really know yourself. In practice, it is much easier to police your own thoughts than your own words. When choosing between two ideas, the temptation to prefer the safer one is almost irresistible. This is a source of cognitive distortion which the anons and outsiders do not experience. (Though anons do suffer something of the opposite, a reflex to provoke.)

As a pundit, you sense this stress in every bone of your body; you can never show it to your readers. This creates a deep dishonesty in the parasocial relationship between writer and reader—like a marriage that can never escape some foolish first-date fib. The falsity, like the blue in blue cheese, flows through and flavors every particle of your content. Neither you nor your readers can ever be sure whether you are speaking the truth, lying to them, or lying to yourself—but you are constantly doing all three. You may still be very entertaining—enlightening, even. All your work is ephemeral, and once you die only your relatives will remember you. And it’s not even your fault.

…

From my perspective, both the anonymous and official dissidents exhibit a kind of unserious frivolity, but a very different kind. The frivolity of the anon is imaginative, surreal and playful at best, merely puerile at worst. The frivolity of the pundit has no upside; in every paragraph he is breaking Koestler’s rule, and he knows it; the best he can do is to shut up selectively about the things he cannot write about.

And his mens rea, too, is awful. He is selling hope. He is selling answers. Pity the man whose life has brought him to the position of selling answers in which he does not believe, or which he is forced to believe, or which he must force himself to believe. However sophisticated and erudite he may be, he is just a high-end grifter. His little magazine is a Macedonian troll-farm with a PhD. He is lucky if his eloquent essays about the common good don’t appear above a popup bar peddling penis pills—and in fact, I know more than one brilliant scholar in precisely this bathetic position. The frame defines the picture; the context sets the price of the text. Sad!

Worst still must be the reality that bad punditry is worse than useless—since useless strategies for escaping from a real problem are traps. When you lead your readers toward an attractive but ineffective solution, you lead them away from the opposite.

You got into this business to change the world for the better. You cannot avoid the realization that you are changing it for the worse—because your objective function is that of Chaim Rumkowski, the Lodz Ghetto’s “King of the Jews.”

You exist to convince your own followers that they neither can nor should do anything effective. The easiest way to do this is to convince them that ineffective strategies are effective. And this, as we’ll see, is exactly what you cannot avoid doing, dear pundit.

Moreover, from our present position of profound unreality, where the official narrative shared and studied by all normal intelligent people and all prestigious institutions can only be described as a state of venomous delirium, the opportunities to play Judas goat are almost unlimited. Cows, remember: there does not have to be only one Judas goat.

…

A particular favorite of the pundit is the error that AI philosophers call the “first-step fallacy.” It turns out that the first monkey to climb to the top of a tree was taking the first step toward landing on the moon:

First-step thinking has the idea of a successful last step built in. Limited early success, however, is not a valid basis for predicting the ultimate success of one’s project. Climbing a hill should not give one any assurance that if he keeps going he will reach the sky.

When a vendor sells you the moon and ships you a rope-ladder, you’ve been defrauded. Time for that one-star review.

…

Today we’ll chart the edges of the legitimate possible by looking at three recent pundit essays which have done a fine job of exploring those edges, and maybe even expanding them: Richard Hanania’s “Why is Everything Liberal?”, Scott Alexander’s “The New Sultan”, and Tanner Greer’s “The Problem of the New Right.”

…

After reading Hanania’s essay, a fourth pundit (who is out as a radical conservative) asked me: why does the right always lose? “Narcissistic delusions,” I replied.

Which was far from what he expected to hear, or what most readers will take from the essay. All three of these essays are good and true; but their inability to go far enough leaves them pointing their audience in precisely the wrong direction.

Most readers will emerge feeling that conservatives need more and better narcissistic delusions. Indeed, both pundit and politician are right there with just such a product. This meretricious frivolity, posing as seriousness, is too egregious to leave unmocked; yet the right reason to mock it is to challenge it to assume its final, truly-serious form.

Richard Hanania and the loser right

Hanania’s true point—backed up with a ream of unnecessary, PhD-worthy evidence—is that the libs always win because they just care more:

…

Since the rebirth of conservatism after the revolutionary monoculture of World War II, all conservative punditry has consisted of attempts to create more excitement around policies and values which effectively resist the power of the prestigious institutions—giving “normal people” as much to care about as their fanatical, aristocratic enemies.

Sensibly, this tends to involve raising “issues” which actually seem to affect their lives, but which also run counter to aristocratic power. Over decades, the substance of these issues changes and even reverses; the opposite stance becomes the useful stance; and “conservative values” have no choice but to change to reflect this. (If this seems like a liberal way to rag on conservatives—the cons learned it from the libs.)

…

“New Right” is not Greer’s term, but as a label I can barely imagine a worse self-own. It promises something ephemeral and irrelevant. So far as I can tell, this same cursed label has been used in every generation of conservatism to mean something different. When it inevitably fails and dies, people forget about it, and the next generation, stuck in the eternal present of a Korsakoff-syndrome movement, can reinvent it.

Who reads the conservative pundits of the ‘80s? Even those who remember them have to throw them under the bus. Every generation of National Review twinks, solemnly intoning what they conceive to be the immortal philosophy of our hallowed founders, is horrified by its predecessor, and horrifies its successor—a truly bathetic spectacle. And of course, each such generation would utterly horrify the actual founders.

…

Greer then goes deep into David Hackett Fischer territory to explain the obvious, yet important, fact that this “New Right” consists of upper-class intellectuals (inherently the heirs of the Puritans, since America’s upper-class tradition is the Puritan tradition) trying to lead middle-class yokels (the heirs of the Scotch-Irish crackers, and (though Greer does not mention this) Irish, Slavs, and other post-Albionic “white ethnic” trash, today even including many Hispanics. He even gives us a clever historical bon mot:

Pity the Whig who wishes to lead the Jackson masses!

Uh, yeah, dude, that would be called “Abraham Lincoln.”

But the point stands. Not just the “New Right” with its new statist ideology, but the whole postwar American Right, is a weird army with a general staff of philosophers and a fighting infantry of ignorant yokels. How can this stay together? How can the philosophers bring forth a mythology that creates passionate intensity in the yokels?

…

There is wisdom in this madness, of course—the problem is caused by aristocrats whose minds are wholly given over to narcissistic delusions. Doesn’t it take fire to fight fire? Doesn’t it take passionate intensity? Isn’t passionate intensity generated only by myths, dreams, poems and religions, not autistic formulas for tax policy? So the answer is clear: we need more and better narcissistic delusions. Ie, shams.

After all, any “founding mythology” is a narcissistic delusion. The flintlock farmers and mechanic mobs of the 1770s, and the Plymouth Puritans of the 1620s, have one thing in common: none of these people even remotely resembles the megachurch grill-and-minivan conservative of the 2020s. None of them even remotely resembles you.

They did live in the same places, and speak sort of the same language. Otherwise you probably have more in common with the average Indonesian housewife—at least she watches the same superhero movies.

To Narcissus, everything is a mirror; in everything and everyone, he sees himself. No field is riper for narcissism than history, since the dead past cannot even laugh at the present’s appropriations of a human reality it could not even start to comprehend.

And fighting fire with fire is one thing, but fighting the shark in the water is another. For the aristocrat, transcending reality is a core competence. The essence of leftism—always and everywhere an aristocratic trope, however vast its ignorant serf-armies—is James Spader in Pretty in Pink: “If I cared about money, would I treat my father’s house this way?” Mere peasants can never develop this kind of wild energy: that’s the point.

Yet Hanania remains right about the amount of energy that a rational, Kantian agenda for productive collective action motivated by collective self-interest, or even collective self-defense, can generate. The grill-American suburbicon is like Maistre’s Frenchman under the late Jacobins: he has defined deviancy down to rock-bottom. “He feels that he is well-governed, so long as he himself is not being killed.”

O, what to do? When you are solving an engineering problem and see the answer at last, it hits you like a thunderbolt. The conservatives, the normal people, the grill-Americans, must accept their own low energy. They must cease their futile reaching for passionate intensity, whether achieved through Kantian collective realism or Jaffaite founding mythology. They must fight the shark on land.

Conservatives don’t care—at least not enough. Yet they want to matter. Yet they live in a political system where mattering is a function of caring—not just voting. Therefore, there are two potential solutions: (a) make them care more; (b) make systems that let them matter more, without caring more.

Conservatives have low energy. They want high impact—at this point, they need high impact. After all, once you yourself are being killed, it’s kind of too late. Any engineer would tell you that there are two paths to high impact: more energy, or more efficiency.

Conservatives vote but don’t care. If we don’t have a viable way to make conservatives care more—meaning orders of magnitude more—effective strategies and structures must generate power by voting, not caring. They must maximize power per vote.

…

Interference means voters who are on the same team are working against each other. Impedance means voters resist delegating their complete consent to the team.

Interference is like a bunch of ants pulling the breadcrumb in different directions. To eliminate interference, point all your votes at one structurally cohesive entity which never works against itself.

Impedance is like getting married for a limited trial period, so long as your wife stays hot and keeps liking the stuff you like. As Burke pointed out in his famous speech to the electors of Bristol, the fundamental nature of electoral consent is unconditional:

To deliver an opinion, is the right of all men; that of Constituents is a weighty and respectable opinion, which a Representative ought always to rejoice to hear; and which he ought always most seriously to consider.

But authoritative Instructions; Mandates issued, which the Member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgement and conscience; these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental Mistake of the whole order and tenor of our Constitution.

The cause of electoral impedance in the modern world is the conventional concept of “agendas” or “platforms” or “issues.” When you vote not for a cohesive entity, but for a list of instructions you are giving to that entity, you are not voting your full power. You are voting for Burke’s opponent, who felt “his Will ought to be subservient to yours.” In effect, you are voting for yourself. Narcissism once again rears its ugly head.

When you vote an agenda, you are granting limited consent to your representative. You say: I vote for you, for a limited time, so long as you stay fit and cook tasty dinners. I am actually not voting for you! I am voting for “reforms for conservatives” (Hanania). I am voting for “a broad set of shared attitudes and policy prescriptions” (Greer). Dear, I am not marrying you. I am marrying hot sex, regular cleaning and delicious meals—till ten extra pounds, or maybe at most fifteen, do us part.

You implicitly withhold your consent for anything not on your jejune list of bullet points. Then, you wonder why your representatives have no power and are constantly mocked, disobeyed, tricked and destroyed by people who are legally their employees. This is not political sex. This is political masturbation. You voted for yourself. And instead of a baby, all you got was a wad of tissues. Nice way to “drain the swamp.”

Your vote does not work because you are not voting, delegating, or granting consent. You are like an archer with one arrow who, afraid of losing it, refuses to let go of it. Without releasing his dart, all he can do is run up to the enemy and try to stab.

So if conservatives want to maximize the impact of their votes, all they have to do is the opposite of what they’re doing. Instead of voting for the okonomi a-la-carte stupid little political menus of hundreds of unconnected candidates and their staffs, they can all vote for the omakase prix-fixe chef’s-choice of a single cohesive governing entity.

Such a power, elected, has the voters’ mandate not just to “govern,” but to rule. When no other private or public force enjoys any such consent, no other force can resist. We are certainly well beyond “rule of law” at this point! On the inaugural podium, the new President announces a state of emergency. He declares himself the Living Constitution. In six months no one will even remember “the swamp.”

Wow! What a simple, clear idea! The engineer, when he comes across so compelling and obvious a design, knows there’s a catch: he won’t get the patent. Someone else must have invented it before. People may be stupid—but they’re not that stupid.

Indeed we have just reasoned our way to reinventing the oldest, most common, and most successful form of government: monarchy. And we are setting it against the second most common form, the institutional rule of power-obsessed elites: oligarchy. And to install our monarchy, we are using the collective action of a large number of people who each perform one small act: democracy.

The alliance of monarchy and democracy (king and people) against oligarchy (church and/or nobles) is the oldest political strategy in the book. The suburban conservative, who just wants to grill, either has no idea this ancient and trivial solution exists, or regards it as the worst thing in the world—even worse, possibly, than his sixth-grader’s mandatory sex change.

And why? Ask your friendly local Judas goat, the pundit. Even the “new right” pundit—who only differs in his policies and issues. Which are, true, slightly less useless. As the top of the tree is slightly closer to the moon.

The 20th century even came up with a handy pejorative for a newborn monarchy. We call it fascism. No word on whether Cromwell, Caesar, or Charlemagne, let alone Louis XIV, Frederick II and Elizabeth I, were fascists.

But, to borrow Scott Alexander’s charming term, also not his own invention, they were certainly strongmen. TLDR: if you want to be strong, elect one strongman. If you prefer to be weak, elect a whole bunch of weakmen. Do you prefer to be weak? “If the rule you followed brought you to this place—of what use was the rule?”

The pundit reassures you that you don’t need a strongman to be strong—you’ll do fine with weakmen—so long as those weakmen have the right “shared attitudes and policy prescriptions.” By the way, here are some attitudes I’m happy to share with you. Click now to accept cookies. Did I mention that I have policy prescriptions, too? Skip ad in 5 seconds. Congratulations, you’ve been automatically subscribed! Check the box to opt out of most emails—void where prohibited by law—terms and conditions may apply…

…

An odd sort of pundit, who remains only nominally anonymous but has always very much GAF, Scott Alexander does not have Hanania’s cagey diplomatic noncommittal. As a “rationalist,” he is deeply committed to his own class status, and to oligarchy itself—which, like most, he misidentifies as “democracy.”

While the whole raison d’etre of the rationalist is the irrationality of our oligarchy, as displayed in genius moves like refusing to cancel regularly-scheduled airline flights to stop a Holocaust-tier pandemic, the rationalist’s dream is a rational oligarchy—using Bayes’ rule, which given infinite computing power will become infinitely intelligent—in Carlyle’s immortal phrase, “a government carried out by steam.”

Obviously, this is not just logical—it immunizes the rationalists from the scurrilous charge of “fascism,” or worse. And they were right about stopping the flights. So was my 9-year-old. Sadly, in a world of universal delusional delirium, rationality can get quite pleased with itself by clearing quite a low bar.

My view is that no government can be or ever has been carried out by steam—only by human beings—a species the same today as in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, if possibly a little dumber on average—and this will remain the case until some computational or genetic singularity occurs. For neither of which events will I hold my breath. This is why I find it easy to picture 21st-century America under the phronetic monarchy of an experienced and capable President-CEO, and almost hilariously impossible to picture it under a Bayesian bureaucracy of polyamorous smart-contracts.

Alexander disagrees. Here is his analysis—the same text that Hanania quotes. Let’s go through it thought by thought, and see if we can’t turn it into some delicious carnitas.

…

Let’s get back to those “elites.” Alexander conflates three quite orthogonal concepts in his use of the word “elite”: biology, institutions, and culture.

Elite biology is high IQ, which is genetic. Elite institutions are any centers of organized collective power—Harvard, the Komsomol, the Mafia, etc. Elite culture is whatever ideas flourish within elite institutions.

Destroying biology is genocide—specifically, aristocide. Destroying institutions is… paperwork. Who hasn’t worked for a company that went out of business? Same deal. And if the culture is the consequence of the institutions, different institutions (with the same human biology) will inevitably nurture different ideas.

The SS was anything but a low-IQ institution, yet it propagated a very different culture than Harvard. 21st-century Germany is anything but a low-IQ country, but the ideas of Kurt Eggers do not flourish in it. It seems that high-IQ institutions can be destroyed—and the new “elite culture” will be the culture of the institutions that replace them.

So the only target is the institutions. There is nothing “nasty” about closing an office. In the worst possible scenario, the police need to clear the building, lock the doors, and impound the servers. Such tasks are well within their core competence, and can be performed with calm professionalism. They will probably not even need their zip-ties.

…

For democracy to be effective in such a situation, it must know its own limitations. It can seize the reins—but only to hand them to some effective power. This power must have one of three forms: an existing oligarchy, a new monarchy, or a foreign power.

Also, there are three classes in an advanced society, not just two: nobles, commoners, and clients. Since clients support their patrons by definition, once nobles plus clients outnumber commoners, the commoners have permanently lost the numbers game. This is why importing client voters is a recipe for either civil war or eternal tyranny—if not both.

…

Yes. This is what happened in denazification, except with monarchy and oligarchy reversed. For example, all German media firms today are descendants of institutions created, or at least certified, by AMGOT. Nothing “organic” about it.

The essential problem with Alexander’s picture of this process is that, since like most smart people today he inhabits Cicero’s great quote about history and children, he simply cannot imagine replacing one kind of elite institution with another. Nor can he imagine high-IQ elites—human beings as smart as him—which are as loyal to a new sane monarchy as today’s elites are loyal, slavishly loyal, to our old insane oligarchy. Does he think that Elizabeth’s London had no elites? Caesar’s Rome?

If Alexander was analyzing the Soviet Union in the same way, he would conclude that elites are inherently devoted to building socialism for the workers and peasants. Since the present world he lives in is all of history for him, he cannot see the general theory which predicts this special case: elites like to get ahead. To genuinely change the world, change what it takes for elites to get ahead.

If the elites are poets and their only way to get ahead is to write interminable reams of “race opera,” as my late wife liked to put it, the floodgates of race opera will open. If the elites are poets and their only way to get ahead is to write interminable reams of Stalin hagiography, Stalin will be praised to the skies in beautiful and clever rhymes.

…

There are two big strawmen here. Let’s turn them into steelmen.

First, “the populace uses the government” is non-Burkean. The populace (not all of it, just the middle class) installs the government. Then it goes back to grilling. So long as the commoners have to be in charge of the regime, and the commoners are weak, the regime will be weak. They need to “fire and forget.” Otherwise, they just lose.

Second, Alexander has clearly never heard of the atelier movement. No, this is not the same thing as your grandma in front of the TV copying Bob Ross.

What happens is this: every (oligarchic) art school and art critic no longer exists. Not that they are killed, of course. Just that their employers are liquidated (not with a bullet in the neck, just with a letter from the bank). They exist physically, not professionally. They were already bureaucrats—they had careers, not passions. Who gets fired, but keeps doing his job just for fun? Certainly not a bureaucrat.

And every (oligarchic) artist no longer exists—not that they are killed, of course. Just that the rich socialites who used to buy their stuff got letters from the bank, too. Libs sometimes talk about a wealth tax—a one-time wealth cap, perhaps at a modest level like $20 mil, will concentrate the rich man’s mind wonderfully on actual necessities.

Elites like to get ahead. The people who got ahead in the oligarchic art scene can no longer get ahead by doing shitty, bureaucratic, 20th-century conceptual art. Because there were so many of them, and because the demand for this product has dropped by at least one order of magnitude if not two, elite ambition is replaced by elite revulsion.

The enormous supply-and-demand imbalance for both art and artists in 20th-century styles leaves these styles about as fashionable as disco in 1996. “Paintings” that used to sell for eight figures will be stacked next to the dumpster. “Artists” once celebrated in the Times will be teaching kindergarten, tying trout flies, or cooking delicious dinners.

Inevitably, some of these people have real artistic talent. (The first modern artists had real talent—Picasso was an excellent draftsman.) They can go to an atelier and learn to draw. They will—because now, acquiring real artistic skill is a way to get ahead in art. And again, elites like to get ahead.

…

There is nothing “normal” or “natural” or “organic” about oligarchy. Does Alexander think “uncured” bacon is “organic” because, instead of evil chemical nitrates, it uses healthy, natural celery powder? He sure is easy to fool. But who isn’t?

Culture and academia is already yoked to the will of government in a “heavy-handed manner”—yoked not by the positive pressure of power, but the negative attraction of power. When the formal government defers to institutions that are formally outside the government, it leaks power into them and makes them de facto state agencies.

Power leakage, like a pig lagoon spilling into an alpine lake, poisons the marketplace of ideas with delicious nutrients. Ideas that make the institutions more powerful grow wildly. Eventually these ideas evolve carnivory and learn to positively repress their competitors, which is how our free press and our independent universities have turned our regime into Czechoslovakia in 1971, and our conversation into a Hutu Power after-school special. PS: Black lives matter.

The paradox of “authoritarianism” is that a regime strong enough to implement Frederick the Great’s idea of “free speech”—“they say what they want, I do what I want”—can actually create a free and unbiased marketplace of ideas, which neither represses seditious ideas nor rewards carnivorous ideas. But it takes a lot of power to reach this level of strength—and it requires liquidating all competing powers.

I have never been able to explain this simple idea to anyone, even rationalists with 150+ IQs who can grok quantum computing before breakfast, who didn’t want to understand it. Ultimately it reduces to the painful realization that sovereignty is conserved—that the power of man over man is a human universal. (Also, we all die.)

No surprise that nerds who think of power as Chad shoving them into a locker can’t handle the truth. PS: I went to a public high school as a 12-year-old sophomore, was bullied every day for three years, and graduated college as a virgin. Whoever you are, dear reader, you are not beyond hope. You can handle the truth.

…

And yet: Alexander’s post is about Erdoğan—and his description of Erdoğan is spot on. It also is a perfect description of Orban in Hungary; it applies to Putin in Russia and Xi in China; and it is even pretty accurate for Hitler, Mussolini and friends.

What all these “strongmen” have in common is that they are provincial. Turkey is not exactly the center of the world. Even 20th-century Germany was nowhere near the center of the world, though it could at least imagine becoming that center. If Turkey just disappeared tomorrow, no one would have any reason to care except the Turks. Who needs Turkey for anything? What would collapse—the dried-apricot market?

Erdoğan’s problem is that he cannot vaporize the oligarchy, because the institutions that matter are not in Turkey. The provincial strongman has no choice but to follow the “populist” playbook that Alexander describes so well.

Orban can kick Soros’s university out of Hungary; he cannot do anything at all to Soros, let alone to the global institutions of which Soros is only a small part. He is indeed “arrayed against” these institutions, to which his Hungarian elites (who speak nearly-perfect English) will always be loyal. The contest is unequal and has only one possible winner, though it can last indefinitely long. Even Xi, whose country can quite easily imagine becoming the economic center of the world, is a provincial strongman—in fact, he sent his daughter to Harvard. Sad!

In a global century, the only way for these provincial strongmen to develop genuine local sovereignty is to go full juche. This is simply not possible for Hungary or Turkey, both of which are firmly attached to the cultural, economic, and military teat of the Global American Empire. Indeed it is barely possible for North Korea, a marsupial nation still in China’s pouch. So Alexander is right: these “strongmen” cannot win. Their regimes will all go the way of Franco’s. It’s impressive that they even survive.

Erdoğan simply has no way to attach his best citizens to his own regime. They are citizens of the world. Elites always like to get ahead. If you’re a world-class talent in anything, why would you try to get ahead in Istanbul? Suppose you want to make a name as the world’s greatest Turkish writer. Succeed in New York, then come home. Turkey is a province; provinces are provincial.

Yet I am not a Turk or a Hungarian, and neither is Scott Alexander. The greater any empire, the more essential that its fall begin at the center. The Soviet empire did not fall from the outside in; it was not brought down from Budapest or Prague; it fell from Moscow out.

And the American empire will fall from Washington out—though that may not happen in the lives of those now living. And although nature abhors a vacuum and no empire can be replaced by nothing—and oligarchy, in the modern world, can only be replaced by monarchy—the “strongman” of this monarchy will not look anything like these mere provincial dictators.

…

The result of Alexander’s perceptive calculations, which are only wrong because their only input data is the present, is simply that our present incompetent tyranny is and must be permanent. Of course, every sovereign regime defines itself as permanent. Yet when we look at the past and not just the present, we see that no empire is forever.

Some grim things are happening in America today. These grim things have a silver lining: they expose the gleaming steel jaws of the traps that the aristocracy sets for its commoners. They remind the cattle that a goat is not a cow and a baa is not a moo.

Every pundit is a Cicero. And amidst all the greatness of his rhetoric, Cicero could not imagine a world that had no use for Ciceros—a world governed by competence, not rhetoric. By the time Caesar crossed the Rubicon, nothing had failed more completely than the whole Roman idea of governance by rhetoric—an idea many centuries old, an idea whose execution had beaten all competitors to capture the whole civilized world, but an idea that was past its sell-by date. Rome herself was no longer suited to it. The republican aristocracy of Rome no longer meant Regulus and Scipio and Cincinnatus; it meant Milo and Clodius and Catiline. Its factional conflict was the choice between Hutu Power and Das Schwarze Korps. Caesar was not a disaster; Caesar was a miracle.

In the death of the American republic, every detail is different. The story is the same. The contrast in capacity between SpaceX and the Pentagon, Moderna and the CDC, Apple and Minneapolis—between our monarchical corporations, and our oligarchical institutions—is a dead ringer for the contrast between the legions and the Senate.

The sooner we stop pretending that this isn’t happening to us, the better results we can get. Wouldn’t it be nice to get to Caesar, Augustus and Marcus Aurelius, without passing through Sulla and Marius, Crassus and Spartacus? Alas, from here and now it seems unlikely. But I can’t see why every serious person wouldn’t want to try.

[joachimnapoleon]

Murat’s fateful decision

In the aftermath of Waterloo, Murat, having been consigned by Napoleon to a country house in Toulon in the weeks prior to the battle, suddenly found himself rendered a fugitive. A royalist mob murdered Marshal Brune; Marshal Ney was being hunted down; and the Marquis de Rivière placed a bounty on the head of Murat, who had advocated to save the marquis’ life over a decade earlier. 

Realizing that his native land was no longer safe for him, the fugitive King of Naples--and having not abdicated, Murat still very much considered himself a king--planned his escape. His master of horse, the Duke of Roccaromana, and Murat’s nephew Bonnafous, made arrangements for him him to board a boat in the Bay of Toulon. Murat’s clothing and most of his remaining money—some 200,000 francs—were loaded onto the vessel in advance. The boat somehow ended up at the wrong destination. By the time the mistake was realized, a party of royalists hunting for Murat had boarded the vessel, “threatening,” writes Macirone, former aide-de-camp of Murat, “with horrid imprecations, that if they found the king, they would cut him in pieces.” Failing to find their quarry, they forced the vessel to sail off. Murat was now alone.

He wandered for days, deprived of food and shelter, constantly on the lookout for his pursuers. Finally he dared to approach a farmhouse; an elderly woman greeted him at the door, without recognition. He passed himself off as an officer of the Toulon garrison who had lost his way. While enjoying his first fresh meal in days inside, the master of the house returned. This man, a naval officer, did recognize Murat, but, to the king’s relief, swore to protect him from his pursuers and to provide him any possible assistance in making his escape from the country. Murat remained holed up in this house for several days, attended by the old woman, whofaithfully watched over him as he slept. On the 13th of August, a party of royalists descended on the house; Murat barely managed to conceal himself in time to avoid discovery. He was finally forced to conclude that the Allies had abandoned him; his hopes of receiving word from Paris to be taken under their protection were in vain.

The proprietor of the farmhouse had introduced Murat to three former naval officers, Captain Oletta and Lieutenants Donnadieu and Langlade. They pledged themselves to Murat, and, following the sale of some of Murat’s remaining diamonds, procured a small ship. On the night of the 22nd of August, the party set sail for Corsica. A violent storm nearly destroyed the vessel on the 24th. Spying another ship in the distance in the aftermath of the storm, they asked to be taken on board. It turned out to be the post packet which regularly sailed between Toulon and Bastia, and was then on its way back to Corsica. On board the packet, Murat met Mathieu Galvani, who had served in the Neapolitan army. Seeing that Galvani wore the medal of Murat’s Order of the Two Sicilies, Murat warmed to him quickly; Galvani would remain with the king, serving as his personal secretary, until being severely wounded at Murat’s side on the shores of Pizzo.

Arriving at Bastia, Murat made his way to the nearby village of Vescovato. The king and his entourage were warmly received by the mayor of the village, André Colonna-Cecaldi, the father-in-law of Murat’s former aide-de-camp, General Franceschetti. Franceschetti, recently retired from his service in the Neapolitan army and having resettled in Corsica with his family, would likewise remain attached to Murat for the majority of the rest of his days.

Corsica at this time was deeply divided between Bonapartists, Bourbonites, and pro-English factions. Unfortunately for Murat, the commander of the Bastia garrison, Colonel Verrier, was a Bourbon sympathizer, who soon resolved to deliver “Mr. Murat” over to the royalists. He requested Murat to visit him. “It will not appear surprising,” observes Macirone, “that King Joachim should have refused to comply with the summons of this madman.” The angered Verrier responded to this refusal with a proclamation to the people declaring Murat a “disruptor” who, “violating the laws of hospitality, wants to trouble your tranquility and expose you to the horrors of civil war.” He authorized a force of several hundred men to proceed to Vescovato and capture the fugitive, adding that those who “receive the pay of Mr. Murat, who directly or indirectly assist his maneuvers, will be arrested and punished as traitors and rebels.”

Verrier’s incendiary proclamation had the immediate effect of rallying hundreds of Bonapartists from all over Corsica to the defense of Napoleon’s brother-in-law. To avoid bloodshed, Murat decided to depart from Vescovato, and to proceed towards Ajaccio, the birthplace of Napoleon, where he would undoubtedly find more support (and security). He had, by this point, managed to procure enough money to send Franceschetti on ahead to hire boats for his planned expedition to Naples. The numbers of Murat’s followers grew as he traveled through the villages leading to Ajaccio. “From Vescovato to the birthplace of the Emperor,” writes Galvani, “the passage of the king had been a true triumphal march: all the villages were abandoned, entire populations were staggered on the road to see and behold the king, and the cries of viva Gioacchino! were incessant.” It was just the sort of adulation that never failed to turn Murat’s head, or to fill it with dangerous delusions. In Naples, he had never ceased to be intoxicated by the cheering throngs of the notoriously fickle lazzaroni; now he would find in the enthusiasm of the Corsicans all the encouragement he needed to embark on the enterprise which would spell his doom.

During his stay in Bocognano, he acquired some recent issues of the French newspaper Le Moniteur, one of which included a letter from King Ferdinand of Naples expressing his gratitude to Field Marshal Baron Bianchi for vanquishing Murat’s forces in the recent war. Murat, who had always taken the utmost pride in his Neapolitan army, bristled at seeing Ferdinand refer to it contemptuously as “the enemy bands.” “Is it possible,” Murat raged, “that a king can give to his own subjects such a withering characterization! To this beautiful army created by me! What a disgrace! What infamy!” He then proceeded to dictate to Galvani a twelve-page manifesto, which he intended to be read by the Neapolitan people, denouncing Ferdinand for his past atrocities and reminding them of “the numerous advantages that they had received during the few years that he [Murat] had governed them.” The proclamation would be reprinted en masse prior to hisdeparture for Naples.

Murat was in Ajaccio by the time his aide-de-camp, Francis Macirone had arrived in Bastia, carrying with him passports and an offer of asylum for Murat, from Metternich. Macirone learned of Verrier’s attempt to seize Murat, and was also informed that “great alarm prevailed at Naples, where it had been reported that an attack was contemplated by King Joachim, but that every necessary preparation had been made to repel it.” The captain who divulged this information to Macirone planned to send his gun-boats to Ajaccio in order to prevent Murat’s boats from departing. When Macirone informed him of the offer of asylum he bore for Murat from Austria, the captain conceded that, if Murat were to accept them, “he might be authorised to convey him and his suite to their destination” instead. Murat received a letter from Macirone on the 27th of September, imploring him to remain in Ajaccio until Macirone’s arrival.

Macirone reached Ajaccio the next day, as did Ignace Carabelli, who had formerly served Murat. Now, Murat was warned, Carabelli was serving as a spy for the Neapolitan police; Murat did not believe it, and met with Carabelli and Macirone (whom he met with first is disputed; Galvani says the meeting with Carabelli occurred first, while Macirone places Carabelli’s meeting after his own). Carabelli attempted to dissuade Murat from his intended expedition.

“Am I no longer loved by the Neapolitans?” Murat asked. “I know they prefer me to Ferdinand.”

“Yes, sire,” Carabelli replied. “You were loved when you were in Naples; today the Neapolitans say they love Ferdinand: you know them!”

The conversation continued. Failing to change Murat’s mind, and respectfully declining to follow him to Naples, Carabelli took his leave of the king.

According to Galvani, Murat’s private meeting with Macirone lasted around two hours. The primary subject of discussion was the Austrian offer of asylum. Metternich’s offer required the king to “take the name of a private individual. The queen having taken that of Countess of Lipona, the same is suggested to the king.” He “will be free to choose a town of Bohemia, of Moravia, or of High Austria in order to fix his sojourn.” Furthermore, he would be required to give his word to the Austria Emperor that he would not leave the Austrian states without the Emperor’s express consent. Though the Austrian offer of asylum did not explicitly require Murat to abdicate, Murat recognized in it not only a de facto abdication, but a benign form of imprisonment. Macirone’s initial optimism that Murat would accept the offer was short-lived. “I now had recourse to every argument and supplication in my power to induce him to accede to the proposal,” he records, “and I informed him that an English frigate waited at Bastia to convey him to Trieste. He replied, that I was come too late, that the die was cast, that he had waited nearly three months with the utmost patience, and at the constant risk of his life for the decision of the allies. That it appeared evident to him that he had been abandoned by the sovereigns who had so lately courted his alliance, to perish by the revengeful daggers of his enemies, and that he had at length resolved to attempt to regain his kingdom.” Macirone continued to plead with Murat to accept the offer of asylum, rejoin his family, and “await some favourable turn in the affairs of Europe, which might lead to the re-establishment of his fortunes,” but “these arguments were, however, of no avail.” Murat declared his intention of setting sail that very night. He granted Macirone’s request of issuing a formal, written response to the offer of asylum, “in which his real intentions regarding his expedition are disguised.” 

Macirone was then invited to join Murat and several other members of his entourage, including General Franceschetti, for dinner. The subject of Waterloo arose. Murat “much praised the valour and discipline of the English troops,” Macirone says, “but he reprobated the manner in which the French cavalry had been employed and sacrificed. He then proceeded to demonstrate to me the manoeuvres and measures, which he said he should have directed and adopted if he had commanded the cavalry, and which he flattered himself would certainly have ensured a very different result.” Galvani recalls Macirone granting to Murat that he would’ve surely broken the Austrian and Prussian squares, but not the English ones. Amused, Murat repeated that he surely would have broken them. “This is not boasting,” said the king. “Europe knows me. I’ve never been repelled by an enemy square!” 

After dinner, Murat and Macirone met privately once more. “Here I again took an opportunity of resuming my supplications to him to abandon his project,” writes Macirone, “but I found him immoveable.” Macirone succeeded, however, in convincing Murat to take the passport for Trieste, “in the fond hope that he might, during the course of his voyage, determine to avail himself of it, and abandon his hostile enterprize.” Murat then “observed to me, that the letter which he had just addressed to me, contained a deception, which he regarded as unbecoming to his dignity, and that it was his intention to address me another, in which he would inform me of his real intentions, and enter into some explanations concerning the motives of his conduct.” 

“Captivity and death are to me synonymous,” Murat explained in this second letter. “I will not accept, Mr. Macirone, the conditions which you are charged to offer me. I perceive nothing in them, but an absolute abdication, on the mere condition that I shall be permitted to exist, but in eternal captivity, subjected to the arbitrary action of the laws under a despotic government.” He castigated the allies for whom he had “in a very critical moment decided the campaign of 1814,” and who were now pursuing him “with the overwhelming might of their persecutions.” “I have not abdicated,” Murat stressed. “I have a right to recover my crown, if God gives me the force and the means…. By the time you receive this letter, I shall be well advanced towards my destination. I shall either succeed, or terminate my misfortunes with my life. I have faced death a thousand and a thousand times in fighting for my country: --shall I not be permitted to brave it once for myself? I tremble only for the fate of my family.” Following the completion of this letter in Joachim’s hand, copies of it were transcribed by his secretary. Macirone then took his leave of Murat for the final time. 

General Franceschetti likewise writes of having begged Murat to forego his plans to depart for Naples, and to accept the Austrian offer of asylum. “I represented to him a death without glory,” Franceschetti recalls, “awaiting him at the shore, his companions expiring at his feet, immolated for a desperate cause; alternately, I offered him the more flattering picture of his spouse and his children, of their tenderness, of their caresses, and I tried to open his heart to the delicious hope of this perspective.” His efforts proved as fruitless as those of Macirone. “I had the pain of seeing him persist in his design,” Murat’s former aide dolefully records. The king responded that he did not want to be “the voluntary object of triumph for the house of Austria, I refuse the asylum it offers me on such conditions; I will only see the queen again on the throne of Naples.”

The force with which Murat intended to land on the shores of Naples numbered 298 including the king himself, as well as Franceschetti and Galvani; this relatively small party of seamen, soldiers, and officers had been chosen from three times as many volunteers. Murat’s view of his popularity in Naples remained undimmed, and he was confident that the people would eagerly flock to his banners as soon as news spread of his return, just as the French had to Napoleon following his escape from Elba. The king was in high spirits, animated with the same indefatigable energy that always burned brightest on the brink of a desperate battle.

The doomed expedition set sail sometime between midnight and one o’clock in the morning on the 29th of September, 1815. 

***

Sources:

-Atteridge, A. Hilliard. Joachim Murat: Marshal of France and King of Naples, 1911

-Colletta, Pietro, General. Histoire des six derniers mois de la vie de Joachim Murat, 1821

-Franceschetti, Dominique-César, General. Mémoires sur les événemens qui ont précédé la mort de Joachim Ier, Roi des Deux-Siciles, 1826

-Galvani, Mathieu. Mémoires sur les événemens qui ont précédé la mort de Joachim-Napoléon, Roi de Deux-Siciles, 1843

-Macirone, Francis. Interesting Facts Relating to the Fall and Death of Joachim Murat, 1817

[darkblueboxs]

Strawberry Lips

For #aftgsummer

Prompt: Popsicle

Rating: M

Read here or on AO3

*

Andrew stares into the empty freezer. “Neil,” he says, letting just enough feeling creep into his tone for Neil to truly understand the depths of his devastation. “You forgot the ice-cream.”

Andrew and Neil make homemade popsicles. Shenanigans ensue.

*

Andrew stares into the empty freezer. “Neil,” he says, letting just enough feeling creep into his tone for Neil to truly understand the depths of his devastation. “You forgot the ice-cream.”

“There was no ice-cream. There was no ice-anything.” Neil is kneeling on the kitchen counter, which he has decided for reasons unknown is easier than the step stool where reaching the upper shelves is concerned. The hem of his shirt rides up as he shoves Andrew’s requested junk food into one of the upper cupboards, apparently labouring under the delusion that lack of easy access will in some way act as a deterrent. “The store had a power outage last night. They don’t have any frozen food at all.”

Andrew lets the freezer door swing shut. There are few things that he allows to truly get under his skin. The idea of countless tubs of ice-cream going to waste in a supermarket dumpster doesn’t make the list, but it does come close. The weather forecast for the next few days could roughly be compared to hell on earth, and Andrew is not in the mood to tolerate a heatwave without suitable frozen goods on hand.

“I did get the last one of these, though.” Neil reaches into one of the bags and pulls out a plastic popsicle-making kit. “I don’t know what people usually put in their moulds, so I bought a few things. Could be interesting?” He slides down from the counter, landing chest-to-chest with Andrew.

“Could be,” Andrew answers non-committaly.

After some debate, they divide the moulds out between them, allowing Neil to chop and blend as much fruity yogurty shit as he wants for his own popsicles while Andrew works on how to best liquefy chocolate. He ends up with a milk-and-melted-chocolate concoction which Neil wrinkles his nose at while Andrew fills his containers. Andrew dusts icing sugar in before adding the sticks, not because he thinks it will improve the flavour, but just to see Neil’s barely restrained horror.

Andrew slouches off to the living room to clean out the mixing bowl. Neil turns up with leftover strawberries in time to wipe up the dregs Andrew’s fingers missed. Fruit is tolerable, Andrew concedes, in conjunction with chocolate, and watching Neil lick stray dribbles of chocolate mix from his fingers is an added bonus.

Despite having told Andrew that they will have to wait until tomorrow at the earliest, Neil checks on the progress of their creations in the freezer at least twice before bed like a mother hen fussing over her eggs.

The forecast was, for once, correct. The heat hits Columbia like a sledgehammer, and Andrew is eternally grateful that Neil already agreed to a week off from practice, because, air-con or not, Andrew cannot imagine exercising in this.

Luckily, they’re prepared. Neil runs the mould under the tap until two of the popsicles are loose enough to tug free, and they retreat to the couch to enjoy the fruits of their labour. Andrew’s creation tastes better than he expected, although in truth his standards have never been high as long as the sugar content was to his satisfaction.

Andrew bites through his popsicle in a matter of minutes. Neil does not go for the same strategy, choosing instead to lap at the tip absent-mindedly while he browses the Exy magazine lying open in his lap. Andrew watches a bead of condensation roll down the creamy-pink popsicle and drip, unnoticed, onto Neil’s shirt. Neil seems unconcerned by the ticking time bomb that is a popsicle in a warm room; he continues with a series of kitten-licks occasionally broken up as he runs his tongue along the length of the popsicle to catch any run-off juice before it can drip onto his magazine. It’s when Neil swirls his tongue around the end before pulling off with a faint pop that Andrew begins to wonder if he's being fucked with. He tilts his head to one side and upgrades his expression from blank observation to all-out glare. Neil seems genuinely surprised when he notices Andrew’s pointed gaze. “What?”

“You’re taking your time,” Andrew says levelly.

“Not my fault you finished yours in five seconds flat.”

“It’s dribbling everywhere. You’re making a mess,” Andrew says unthinkingly, then hears the innuendo and suddenly finds himself fighting the urge to put his fist through a wall. “You’re being gross.”

“I’m not gonna bite it,” Neil says, so petulantly that Andrew reconsiders the wall as the target of his frustrations. “Hold on, let me just-” And then, to Andrew’s disbelief, Neil tilts back his head and slides the popsicle right to the back of his throat. And Andrew knows the second it hits the back of Neil’s throat because Neil makes a noise, and Andrew knows that noise, and if he has to hear it again under these circumstances, he will commit murder.

Andrew hooks a finger around Neil’s wrist and pulls until the popsicle slides out from Neil’s lips. Neil looks at Andrew, betrayed, his lips painted strawberry-pink. “What?!”

“You have to be kidding me.”

“No?”

“Do you have any idea,” Andrew growls, and then stops, because it’s Neil. Of course he doesn’t. “Allow me to explain.” He places his hand over Neil’s so that they’re both holding the popsicle stick between them and makes pointed eye-contact as he licks a long, wet stripe along the length of the popsicle.

Neil’s eyebrows shoot upwards. “Um.”

Andrew repeats the motion, enjoying the twitch of Neil’s fingers under his. He draws back to lick his lips. “What did you put in these?”

“Strawberries, raspberries, cream, yogurt…” Neil trails off. “Tequila.”

It’s Andrew’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “You held out on me.”

“I wanted to test the recipe out first.” Neil’s eyes haven’t left Andrew’s lips for some time. “Thoughts?”

Andrew hums thoughtfully. Neil’s eyes widen as he leans forward and sucks the popsicle down. He lets his eyes flutter closed as he rolls the popsicle around his mouth. He slides back up, but just as he has Neil convinced that he’s going to relinquish the popsicle he bobs down again, allowing a quiet hum of contentment to slip from his chest as he does so. He’s even sloppier than Neil was, and a few drops of creamy liquid escape over the cusp of the popsicle and dribble across their fingers. Andrew makes another noise, and is rewarded with a quiet, “fuck, Andrew,” for his efforts.

“Yeah,” Andrew says after pulling off with a pop. “I’d say it’s pretty good.”

Neil answers with a noise that is a few octaves higher than his usual tone. He all but throws the Exy magazine to the floor to make way for Andrew climbing into his lap, struggling to balance the rapidly melting popsicle with Andrew’s sudden weight. Andrew doesn’t waste time worrying about what Neil is going to do with it, not when his face is right there, cheeks flushed and lips still stained from the fruit, and when he seizes Neil’s face in his hands and kisses him, he can taste it on Neil’s lips and in his mouth and on his tongue and it is perfect. Neil kisses back like he’s getting drunk on Andrew’s mouth, and maybe he is.

Like fighting gravity, Andrew pulls himself back long enough to say, “You can touch me.”

Neil waggles his free hand in Andrew’s eyeline, which shines with trails of melted popsicle juice. “Too sticky.”

Andrew rolls his eyes, takes hold of Neil’s hand, and sucks two fingers into his mouth. Flavour bursts across Andrew’s tongue as he swirls it around the digits, tracking down every drop of juice. Neil swears, a colourful string of expletives that send heat shooting through Andrew’s gut. Andrew chases the fruit down towards Neil’s knuckles, by which time Neil has dropped the cursing in favour of watching, lips parted, as Andrew licks across his skin.

“That… that didn’t help,” Neil says as he stares at his spit-slick fingers.

“Unfortunate,” Andrew replies, before losing himself again in the taste of Neil’s mouth. One of Neil’s hands fists in Andrew’s shirt while his arm hooks around Andrew’s neck like it’s his lifeline. Andrew only spots the problem with this when something cold touches his leg.

“Neil,” Andrew growls into Neil’s mouth. “What did you do with the popsicle?”

“Oh,” Neil says, looking in surprise at his empty hands. “I think I…dropped it?” They both look down at the same time to see the pink puddle dribbling across the cushions. “…oops?”

Andrew hisses in irritation, nudging Neil sideways to remove them from the path of the meltwater. He slides a hand into Neil’s hair and tugs until his lips are at Neil’s ear. “You are going to clean this up,” Andrew says lowly, “And when – only when – this mess is gone, you will find me upstairs.”

Andrew climbs out of Neil’s lap without waiting for a response. It takes Neil a moment to collect himself enough for one, but he manages in time to catch Andrew in the doorway. “Andrew?”

Andrew turns back, eyebrow quirking.

Neil smirks. “So, you like my popsicle?”

Andrew leaves without replying.

*

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for more aftg summer pieces :)

[migleefulmoments]

ahhh yes the ones who really "get" Darren are the people who've spent a decade arguing that 99% of what he says he doesn't mean and 99% of what he does is because he's forced to. it's quite sad how much of their self worth is derived from needing to feel a special connection to a man who doesn't know they exist and who they don't even really like.

OMG I know. How obtuse can a handful of people be? They literally live in the land of make beleive and fantasy. It’s so disheartening to realize that so many people walking this earth right now are flat out morons without the thinking skills of a small child. They spin their world-a world that nobody else can see no matter how hard we try by lying, manipulating photos and fabricating stories, changing context, ignoring everything that disproves their theory, and picking and choosing what they do see. When you have to analyze someone’s life frame-by-frame in order to find the evidence that proves you are right, it’s time to take a big long look at your life. Nobody can tell these people anything- no expert, no scientist, no professional...in this case, not even Darren Criss himself. Not trusting people with experience in said subject is a slippery slope -it’s dangerous to write your own truths because you want it to be true. It’s a delusion. They believe the shit TV writers makeup to sell entertainment. 

The tinhatters are no different than the Trumpites who claim Donald Trump is ending corruption while he is the most corrupt person to ever sit in the Oval office, claim he’s intelligent when in fact he is dumber than my daughter's rabbit whom I adore but will literally stop hopping around and just sit and stare at nothing because -as my son points out- his brain is quite small. They claim that Covid isn’t real because it isn’t impacting them and they are selfish little assholes who think we are Americans and we are brave and nobody will tell us we can’t be free as if Covid is an enemy combatant threatening democracy and not a virus who doesn’t give a shit what religion, nationality, political party or IQ you are.  I guess we have allowed people to spin their own reality for too long, blustering and bullying their way around people smarter, more rational, and more logical than they are for too long, and now this magical thinking is literally going to kill those people. It’s the culling of the morons. Let’s hope that one outcome is a throwback to the love of science and critical thinking and an end to conspiracy theories based on fantasy and nonsense.   

[roman-catholic-mass-readings]

27th June >> Mass Readings (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada)

Saturday, Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time 

    or 

Saint Cyril of Alexandria, Bishop, Doctor 

    or 

Saturday memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Saturday, Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time

(Liturgical Colour: Green)

First Reading

Lamentations 2:2,10-14,18-19

Cry aloud to the Lord, daughter of Zion

The Lord has pitilessly destroyed

all the homes of Jacob;

in his displeasure he has shattered

the strongholds of the daughter of Judah;

he has thrown to the ground,

he has left accursed the kingdom and its rulers.

Mutely they sit on the ground,

the elders of the daughter of Zion;

they have put dust on their heads,

and wrapped themselves in sackcloth.

The virgins of Jerusalem hang their heads

down to the ground.

My eyes wasted away with weeping,

my entrails shuddered,

my liver spilled on the ground

at the ruin of the daughters of my people,

as children, mere infants, fainted

in the squares of the Citadel.

They kept saying to their mothers,

‘Where is the bread?’

as they fainted like wounded men

in the squares of the City,

as they poured out their souls

on their mothers’ breasts.

How can I describe you, to what compare you,

daughter of Jerusalem?

Who can rescue and comfort you,

virgin daughter of Zion?

For huge as the sea is your affliction;

who can possibly cure you?

The visions your prophets had on your behalf

were delusive, tinsel things,

they never pointed out your sin,

to ward off your exile.

The visions they proffered you were false,

fallacious, misleading.

Cry aloud, then, to the Lord,

groan, daughter of Zion;

let your tears flow like a torrent,

day and night;

give yourself no relief,

grant your eyes no rest.

Up, cry out in the night-time,

in the early hours of darkness;

pour your heart out like water

before the Lord.

Stretch out your hands to him

for the lives of your children

who faint with hunger

at the entrance to every street.

The Word of the Lord

R/ Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm

Psalm 73(74):1-7,20-21

R/ Do not forget your poor servants for ever.

Why, O God, have you cast us off for ever?

Why blaze with anger at the sheep of your pasture?

Remember your people whom you chose long ago,

the tribe you redeemed to be your own possession,

the mountain of Zion where you made your dwelling.

R/ Do not forget your poor servants for ever.

Turn your steps to these places that are utterly ruined!

The enemy has laid waste the whole of the sanctuary.

Your foes have made uproar in your house of prayer:

they have set up their emblems, their foreign emblems,

high above the entrance to the sanctuary.

R/ Do not forget your poor servants for ever.

Their axes have battered the wood of its doors.

They have struck together with hatchet and pickaxe.

O God, they have set your sanctuary on fire:

they have razed and profaned the place where you dwell.

R/ Do not forget your poor servants for ever.

Remember your covenant; every cave in the land

is a place where violence makes its home.

Do not let the oppressed return disappointed;

let the poor and the needy bless your name.

R/ Do not forget your poor servants for ever.

Gospel Acclamation

cf. 2 Timothy 1:10

Alleluia, alleluia!

Our Saviour Jesus Christ abolished death

and he has proclaimed life through the Good News.

Alleluia!

Or:

Matthew 8:17

Alleluia, alleluia!

He took our sicknesses away,

and carried our diseases for us.

Alleluia!

Gospel

Matthew 8:5-17

'I am not worthy to have you under my roof: give the word, and my servant will be healed'

When Jesus went into Capernaum a centurion came up and pleaded with him. ‘Sir,’ he said ‘my servant is lying at home paralysed, and in great pain.’ ‘I will come myself and cure him’ said Jesus. The centurion replied, ‘Sir, I am not worthy to have you under my roof; just give the word and my servant will be cured. For I am under authority myself, and have soldiers under me; and I say to one man: Go, and he goes; to another: Come here, and he comes; to my servant: Do this, and he does it.’ When Jesus heard this he was astonished and said to those following him, ‘I tell you solemnly, nowhere in Israel have I found faith like this. And I tell you that many will come from east and west to take their places with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob at the feast in the kingdom of heaven; but the subjects of the kingdom will be turned out into the dark, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.’ And to the centurion Jesus said, ‘Go back, then; you have believed, so let this be done for you.’ And the servant was cured at that moment.

And going into Peter’s house Jesus found Peter’s mother-in-law in bed with fever. He touched her hand and the fever left her, and she got up and began to wait on him.

That evening they brought him many who were possessed by devils. He cast out the spirits with a word and cured all who were sick. This was to fulfil the prophecy of Isaiah:

He took our sicknesses away and carried our diseases for us.

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

————————-

Saint Cyril of Alexandria, Bishop, Doctor 

(Liturgical Colour: White)

(Readings for the memorial)

(There is a choice today between the readings for the ferial day (Saturday) and those for the memorial. The ferial readings are recommended unless pastoral reasons suggest otherwise)

First Reading

2 Timothy 4:1-5

Make the preaching of the Good news your life's work, in thoroughgoing service

Before God and before Christ Jesus who is to be judge of the living and the dead, I put this duty to you, in the name of his Appearing and of his kingdom: proclaim the message and, welcome or unwelcome, insist on it. Refute falsehood, correct error, call to obedience – but do all with patience and with the intention of teaching. The time is sure to come when, far from being content with sound teaching, people will be avid for the latest novelty and collect themselves a whole series of teachers according to their own tastes; and then, instead of listening to the truth, they will turn to myths. Be careful always to choose the right course; be brave under trials; make the preaching of the Good News your life’s work, in thoroughgoing service.

The Word of the Lord

R/ Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm

Psalm 88(89):2-5,21-22,25,27

R/ I will sing for ever of your love, O Lord.

I will sing for ever of your love, O Lord;

through all ages my mouth will proclaim your truth.

Of this I am sure, that your love lasts for ever,

that your truth is firmly established as the heavens.

R/ I will sing for ever of your love, O Lord.

‘I have made a covenant with my chosen one;

I have sworn to David my servant:

I will establish your dynasty for ever

and set up your throne through all ages.

R/ I will sing for ever of your love, O Lord.

‘I have found David my servant

and with my holy oil anointed him.

My hand shall always be with him

and my arm shall make him strong.

R/ I will sing for ever of your love, O Lord.

‘My truth and my love shall be with him;

by my name his might shall be exalted.

He will say to me: “You are my father,

my God, the rock who saves me.”’

R/ I will sing for ever of your love, O Lord.

Gospel Acclamation

Matthew 5:16

Alleluia, alleluia!

Your light must shine in the sight of men,

so that, seeing your good works,

they may give the praise to your Father in heaven.

Alleluia!

Gospel

Matthew 5:13-19

Your light must shine in the sight of men

Jesus said to his disciples: ‘You are the salt of the earth. But if salt becomes tasteless, what can make it salty again? It is good for nothing, and can only be thrown out to be trampled underfoot by men.

‘You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill-top cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp to put it under a tub; they put it on the lamp-stand where it shines for everyone in the house. In the same way your light must shine in the sight of men, so that, seeing your good works, they may give the praise to your Father in heaven.

‘Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to complete them. I tell you solemnly, till heaven and earth disappear, not one dot, not one little stroke, shall disappear from the Law until its purpose is achieved. Therefore, the man who infringes even one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be considered the least in the kingdom of heaven; but the man who keeps them and teaches them will be considered great in the kingdom of heaven.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

—————————

Saturday memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary 

(Liturgical Colour: White)

(Readings for the memorial)

(There is a choice today between the readings for the ferial day (Saturday) and those for the memorial. The ferial readings are recommended unless pastoral reasons suggest otherwise)

First Reading

Genesis 3:9-15,20

The mother of all those who live

After Adam had eaten of the tree the Lord God called to him. ‘Where are you?’ he asked. ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden;’ he replied ‘I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.’ ‘Who told you that you were naked?’ he asked ‘Have you been eating of the tree I forbade you to eat?’ The man replied, ‘It was the woman you put with me; she gave me the fruit, and I ate it.’ Then the Lord God asked the woman, ‘What is this you have done?’ The woman replied, ‘The serpent tempted me and I ate.’

Then the Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this,

‘Be accursed beyond all cattle,

all wild beasts.

You shall crawl on your belly and eat dust

every day of your life.

I will make you enemies of each other:

you and the woman,

your offspring and her offspring.

It will crush your head

and you will strike its heel.’

The man named his wife ‘Eve’ because she was the mother of all those who live.

The Word of the Lord

R/ Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm

1 Samuel 2:1,4-8

R/ My heart exults in the Lord my Saviour.

My heart exults in the Lord.

I find my strength in my God;

my mouth laughs at my enemies

as I rejoice in your saving help.

R/ My heart exults in the Lord my Saviour.

The bows of the mighty are broken,

but the weak are clothed with strength.

Those with plenty must labour for bread,

but the hungry need work no more.

The childless wife has children now

but the fruitful wife bears no more.

R/ My heart exults in the Lord my Saviour.

It is the Lord who gives life and death,

he brings men to the grave and back;

it is the Lord who gives poverty and riches.

He brings men low and raises them on high.

R/ My heart exults in the Lord my Saviour.

He lifts up the lowly from the dust,

from the dungheap he raises the poor

to set him in the company of princes

to give him a glorious throne.

For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s,

on them he has set the world.

R/ My heart exults in the Lord my Saviour.

Gospel Acclamation

cf. Luke 1:28

Alleluia, alleluia!

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee!

Blessed art thou among women.

Alleluia!

Or:

cf. Luke 1:45

Alleluia, alleluia!

Blessed is the Virgin Mary, who believed

that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.

Alleluia!

Or:

cf. Luke 2:19

Alleluia, alleluia!

Blessed is the Virgin Mary,

who treasured the word of God

and pondered it in her heart.

Alleluia!

Or:

Luke 11:28

Alleluia, alleluia!

Happy are those

who hear the word of God

and keep it.

Alleluia!

Or:

Alleluia, alleluia!

Blessed are you, holy Virgin Mary,

and most worthy of all praise,

for the sun of justice, Christ our God,

was born of you.

Alleluia!

Or:

Alleluia, alleluia!

Happy is the Virgin Mary,

who, without dying,

won the palm of martyrdom

beneath the cross of the Lord.

Alleluia!

Either:

Gospel

Matthew 1:1-16,18-23

The ancestry and conception of Jesus Christ

A genealogy of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham:

Abraham was the father of Isaac,

Isaac the father of Jacob,

Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,

Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah, Tamar being their mother,

Perez was the father of Hezron,

Hezron the father of Ram,

Ram was the father of Amminadab,

Amminadab the father of Nahshon,

Nahshon the father of Salmon,

Salmon was the father of Boaz, Rahab being his mother,

Boaz was the father of Obed, Ruth being his mother,

Obed was the father of Jesse;

and Jesse was the father of King David.

David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife,

Solomon was the father of Rehoboam,

Rehoboam the father of Abijah, Abijah the father of Asa,

Asa was the father of Jehoshaphat,

Jehoshaphat the father of Joram,

Joram the father of Azariah,

Azariah was the father of Jotham,

Jotham the father of Ahaz,

Ahaz the father of Hezekiah,

Hezekiah was the father of Manasseh,

Manasseh the father of Amon,

Amon the father of Josiah;

and Josiah was the father of Jechoniah and his brothers.

Then the deportation to Babylon took place.

After the deportation to Babylon:

Jechoniah was the father of Shealtiel,

Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel,

Zerubbabel was the father of Abiud,

Abiud the father of Eliakim,

Eliakim the father of Azor,

Azor was the father of Zadok,

Zadok the father of Achim,

Achim the father of Eliud,

Eliud was the father of Eleazar,

Eleazar the father of Matthan,

Matthan the father of Jacob;

and Jacob was the father of Joseph the husband of Mary;

of her was born Jesus who is called Christ.

This is how Jesus Christ came to be born. His mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph; but before they came to live together she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph; being a man of honour and wanting to spare her publicity, decided to divorce her informally. He had made up his mind to do this when the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son and you must name him Jesus, because he is the one who is to save his people from their sins.’ Now all this took place to fulfil the words spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son

and they will call him Emmanuel,

a name which means ‘God-is-with-us.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Or:

Gospel

Matthew 1:18-23

How Jesus Christ came to be born

This is how Jesus Christ came to be born. His mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph; but before they came to live together she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph; being a man of honour and wanting to spare her publicity, decided to divorce her informally. He had made up his mind to do this when the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son and you must name him Jesus, because he is the one who is to save his people from their sins.’ Now all this took place to fulfil the words spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son

and they will call him Emmanuel,

a name which means ‘God-is-with-us.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Or:

Gospel

Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

The flight into Egypt and the return to Nazareth

After the wise men had left, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother with you, and escape into Egypt, and stay there until I tell you, because Herod intends to search for the child and do away with him.’ So Joseph got up and, taking the child and his mother with him, left that night for Egypt, where he stayed until Herod was dead. This was to fulfil what the Lord had spoken through the prophet:

I called my son out of Egypt.

After Herod’s death, the angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother with you and go back to the land of Israel, for those who wanted to kill the child are dead.’ So Joseph got up and, taking the child and his mother with him, went back to the land of Israel. But when he learnt that Archelaus had succeeded his father Herod as ruler of Judaea he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he left for the region of Galilee. There he settled in a town called Nazareth. In this way the words spoken through the prophets were to be fulfilled:

‘He will be called a Nazarene.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Or:

Gospel

Matthew 12:46-50

My mother and my brothers are anyone who does the will of my Father in heaven

Jesus was speaking to the crowds when his mother and his brothers appeared; they were standing outside and were anxious to have a word with him. But to the man who told him this Jesus replied, ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ And stretching out his hand towards his disciples he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. Anyone who does the will of my Father in heaven, he is my brother and sister and mother.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Or:

Gospel

Luke 1:26-38

'I am the handmaid of the Lord'

The angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the House of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. He went in and said to her, ‘Rejoice, so highly favoured! The Lord is with you.’ She was deeply disturbed by these words and asked herself what this greeting could mean, but the angel said to her, ‘Mary, do not be afraid; you have won God’s favour. Listen! You are to conceive and bear a son, and you must name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David; he will rule over the House of Jacob for ever and his reign will have no end.’ Mary said to the angel, ‘But how can this come about, since I am a virgin?’ ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you’ the angel answered ‘and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow. And so the child will be holy and will be called Son of God. Know this too: your kinswoman Elizabeth has, in her old age, herself conceived a son, and she whom people called barren is now in her sixth month, for nothing is impossible to God.’ ‘I am the handmaid of the Lord,’ said Mary ‘let what you have said be done to me.’ And the angel left her.

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Or:

Gospel

Luke 1:39-47

Blessed is she who believed the promise

Mary set out and went as quickly as she could to a town in the hill country of Judah. She went into Zechariah’s house and greeted Elizabeth. Now as soon as Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. She gave a loud cry and said, ‘Of all women you are the most blessed, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. Why should I be honoured with a visit from the mother of my Lord? For the moment your greeting reached my ears, the child in my womb leapt for joy. Yes, blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.’

And Mary said:

‘My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord

and my spirit exults in God my saviour.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Or:

Gospel

Luke 2:1-14

'In the town of David a saviour has been born to you'

Caesar Augustus issued a decree for a census of the whole world to be taken. This census – the first – took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone went to his own town to be registered. So Joseph set out from the town of Nazareth in Galilee and travelled up to Judaea, to the town of David called Bethlehem, since he was of David’s House and line, in order to be registered together with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. While they were there the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to a son, her first born. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them at the inn.

In the countryside close by there were shepherds who lived in the fields and took it in turns to watch their flocks during the night. The angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone round them. They were terrified, but the angel said, ‘Do not be afraid. Listen, I bring you news of great joy, a joy to be shared by the whole people. Today in the town of David a saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. And here is a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly with the angel there was a great throng of the heavenly host, praising God and singing:

‘Glory to God in the highest heaven,

and peace to men who enjoy his favour.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Or:

Gospel

Luke 2:15-19

The shepherds hurried to Bethlehem and found the baby lying in the manger

Now when the angels had gone from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened which the Lord has made known to us.’ So they hurried away and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in the manger. When they saw the child they repeated what they had been told about him, and everyone who heard it was astonished at what the shepherds had to say. As for Mary, she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Or:

Gospel

Luke 2:27-35

'A sword will pierce your soul too'

Prompted by the Spirit Simeon came to the Temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the Law required, he took him into his arms and blessed God; and he said:

‘Now, Master, you can let your servant go in peace,

just as you promised;

because my eyes have seen the salvation

which you have prepared for all the nations to see,

a light to enlighten the pagans

and the glory of your people Israel.’

As the child’s father and mother stood there wondering at the things that were being said about him, Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, ‘You see this child: he is destined for the fall and for the rising of many in Israel, destined to be a sign that is rejected – and a sword will pierce your own soul too – so that the secret thoughts of many may be laid bare.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Or:

Gospel

Luke 2:41-52

Mary stored up all these things in her heart

Every year the parents of Jesus used to go to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover. When he was twelve years old, they went up for the feast as usual. When they were on their way home after the feast, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem without his parents knowing it. They assumed he was with the caravan, and it was only after a day’s journey that they went to look for him among their relations and acquaintances. When they failed to find him they went back to Jerusalem looking for him everywhere.

Three days later, they found him in the Temple, sitting among the doctors, listening to them, and asking them questions; and all those who heard him were astounded at his intelligence and his replies. They were overcome when they saw him, and his mother said to him, ‘My child, why have, you done this to us? See how worried your father and I have been, looking for you.’

‘Why were you looking for me?’ he replied. ‘Did you not know that I must be busy with my Father’s affairs?’ But they did not understand what he meant.

He then went down with them and came to Nazareth and lived under their authority.

His mother stored up all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom, in stature, and in favour with God and men.

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Or:

Gospel

Luke 11:27-28

'Happy the womb that bore you and the breasts you sucked!'

As Jesus was speaking, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said, ‘Happy the womb that bore you and the breasts you sucked!’ But he replied, ‘Still happier those who hear the word of God and keep it!’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Or:

Gospel

John 2:1-11

'My hour has not come yet' - 'Do whatever he tells you'

There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee. The mother of Jesus was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited. When they ran out of wine, since the wine provided for the wedding was all finished, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ Jesus said ‘Woman, why turn to me? My hour has not come yet.’ His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ There were six stone water jars standing there, meant for the ablutions that are customary among the Jews: each could hold twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, ‘Fill the jars with water’, and they filled them to the brim. ‘Draw some out now’ he told them ‘and take it to the steward.’ They did this; the steward tasted the water, and it had turned into wine. Having no idea where it came from – only the servants who had drawn the water knew – the steward called the bridegroom and said, ‘People generally serve the best wine first, and keep the cheaper sort till the guests have had plenty to drink; but you have kept the best wine till now.’

This was the first of the signs given by Jesus: it was given at Cana in Galilee. He let his glory be seen, and his disciples believed in him.

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Or:

Gospel

John 19:25-27

'Woman, this is your son'

Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala. Seeing his mother and the disciple he loved standing near her, Jesus said to his mother, ‘Woman, this is your son.’ Then to the disciple he said, ‘This is your mother.’ And from that moment the disciple made a place for her in his home.

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.